The words that we’ve adopted into our vernacular have finally found a home inside of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
To celebrate it’s twelfth edition, the dictionary gods have decided to include “retweet,” “sexting” and “cyberbulling” as part of the 400 new words added to this new edition.
Finally! You can tell you Grandma that “Yes! Retweet is an actual word and no, I didn’t just make it up!”
The very official definitions of these words are listed below.
Retweet
verb: (on the social networking service Twitter) repost or forward (a message posted by another user)
Sexting
noun: the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone
Cyberbullying
noun: the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.
Other words added include “woot,” “jeggings” and “mankini.”
The dictionary’s editor Angus Stevenson (okay, so there’s no such thing as “dictionary gods”) told Channel Four news in the UK said that “new words often reflect the era in which they were added to the dictionary.”
That sounds about right. Sexting blew-up beyond the middle-school set with the Anthony Weiner sex scandal, Cyberbully was a recent ABC Family original movie based off of account of teens being harassed on online forums, and with 175 million users, Twitter is a social networking heavyweight.
We’re interested to see if these words will stand the test of time, or die out as our internet fascination withers. What do you think? Should these words be made official or stay part of our slang?