Merriam-Webster adds over 5,000 words to 'Collegiate' dictionary

NEW YORK, September 28 ------ Word nerd alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thursday it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds over 5,000 new words, including “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone,” and “ghost kitchen.”

The 12th edition of “Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary” comes 22 years after the book's last hard-copy update and amid declining U.S. sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with preorders now available.

Petrichor, by the way, is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the speed of a computer. Dumbphones are just that, mobile devices we used before the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandemic, are commercial spaces for hire.

Other additions: “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “rizz,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “adulting,” and “cancel culture.” There's also “beast mode,” “dashcam,” “doom scroll,” “WFH,” and “side-eye.”

The new “Collegiate” also includes enhanced entries for some top lookups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster.com.

How did they make room for all that?

The company removed two sections of the “Collegiate's” 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new content. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president, exclusively told The Associated Press ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they reach for the internet. (It’s a city in southwest Michigan, for the eternally curious, and he's a Russian composer who died in 1908.)

Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including “enwheel,” meaning encircle. “We wanted to make the ‘Collegiate’ more useful, a better design, more interesting,” Barlow said. “We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book.”

Source: mb.com.ph