Archive for the ‘New words’ Category

“Is “becuase”, with its 4,950,000 hits on a famous web search engine, the commonest typo in the English language? (more…)

“A dollar a day”

(more…)

“Virtual water”

(more…)

Don’t know how new it is actually, but the BBC presenter on this week’s Digital Planet podcast didn’t seem to have heard of it either. The word is:

Voxel

(more…)

Even the name of this dictionary is a kind of pedantic trick (it’s actually huge, and only “shorter” because it’s shorter than the actual Oxford English Dictionary- which is 12 volumes if I remember correctly), and I have a feeling most of the words below are just as uselss as that distinction. Fun to know though…

I knew all these:

arctophile (a person who collects or is very fond of teddy bears)
izzard (a term for the letter Z)
pi-jaw (a moralizing lecture)
muffin-worry (a tea party)
struthious (like an ostrich)
twiffler (a plate or shallow dish)
webinar(a web-based seminar)
bidie-in (a live-in partner)
biffy (an American term for a toilet)
smoosh (squash or crush)
darknet (a kind of illicit computer network)
smart dust (miniaturized sensor/transmitters that are sprinkled onto an area such as a battlefield and used to analyze the environment)
size zero (more…)