Oxford English Dictionary added a slew of new words in its quarterly update this June, including the popular political words “woke” and “post-truth.”
The dictionary announced this month that they were adding the adjectival definition of “woke” in response to how more people are using it these days. PopSugar reports the new dictionary definition for woke is “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice; frequently in stay woke.”
You’ve probably heard “woke” throughout college (and probably said it yourself a few times!), and a lot of that is due to the Black Lives Matter movement, and increased awareness of racism in America in general. People now use it to describe anyone who seems to be socially aware—we’ve even used it to describe Nick from The Bachelor. But while it’s just being added to the dictionary now, this use of the word has been around since the 1960s, according to TIME.
The other stand-out word in this update was “post-truth,” which was also 2016’s word of the year, according to BBC News. “Post-truth” is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One recent post-truth moment, for example, was when Kellyanne Conway said the White House had “alternative facts” about the size of Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd, despite photos clearly showing a difference between Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and Trump’s.
And if you need to see these words in a sentence to really get them, here you go: We hope you all stay woke in a post-truth world!