Words like "vaping," "listicle" or "Paleo diet" won't be underlined in red in Word documents for long, because England's Oxford University Press said Thursday it's adding those same words, plus more, to its online dictionaries to reflect new language trends, The Associated Press reported.
The sites' editors track and analyze about 150 million words used on the Internet, newspapers and other sources, and decide every few months which new words are so widely used that they deserve a dictionary entry.
"These are words that are common enough that you are likely to encounter them, and may have look up their meanings," said Oxford Dictionaries Editor Katherine Martin.
One of these words is "vape" or "vaping," which describes the act of inhaling smokeless nicotine vapor using e-cigarettes. The usage of "vape" and "e-cig" has increased by 10 times in the past two years, according to Oxford Dictionaries.
"The trend of e-cigarettes has created a sort of vocabulary around it," Martin said.
Many of the new entries are informal words or abbreviations that reflect our media consumption habits and the Internet's increasing prominence, AP reported.
Examples include "listicle," an Internet article in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list; "live-tweet," the act of posting comments about an event on Twitter as it's taking place; and "binge-watch," which watching multiple episodes of TV shows.
The Oxford Dictionaries also made headlines last year for adding "twerk" to its online dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries defines twerk as: "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."
But Martin said the inclusion in the online dictionary does not mean the words will become permanent additions to the English language, and many may not even make it into the more traditional Oxford English Dictionary.
"For some of these, we will say 'What was that?' in a decade. Others may become the next selfie," Martin said. "The English-speaking public will choose."
