New words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

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

Okay, I’m lying. I knew none of the ones above and could only have guessed about two.

And ones really I did know (and quite a few I really like):

not have a scooby (have no idea)
Chelsea tractor (a big 4WD car such as a Range Rover driven around London in spotless condition instead of in the country where it was made for)
manbag (a handbag for men)
WAGs (wives and girlfriends, usually the badly behaving ones of English sports stars)
yummy mummy (a good looking mum, I think)
knuckle-dragger(someone who has the look and mentality of an ape)

A few more (not quite so) new words below from The Tribune India:

“With great assiduity, I ransacked many dictionaries. I even flipped through a dictionary of American slang but quickly shut it for it was bursting with pornographic meanings. One of the old, standard dictionaries came to my rescue with its “appendix” of new words. A metrosexual is an urban male with a strong sense of beautifying and decorating himself, security moms are mothers excessively concerned for the safety of their children, particularly after 9/11, a leapling is a person born on February 29 and a testosteronic is an archetypal masculine figure full of brawn but no brain. Sandwich generation is stuck up between their responsibility towards their children and their duties towards the aged. And don’t think that the generation XL is the deluxe model of some car; it is used for overweight young adults…”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:49 pmand is filed under Dictionaries, New words, The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Vocabulary, slang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.