OED Blog – “Well ding-dong, it’s time for OED‘s quarterly update for March 2021, in which nearly 750 existing entries have been subjected to the freshening attentions of our team of researchers, editors, etymologists, and bibliographers, and over 700 new words, senses, phrases, and compounds have been added to the Dictionary. Buckle up, and we’ll take you from astraphobia, a fear of lightning or thunderstorms, to zip ties, and from chapsticks to champagne fountains. From Scottish and Northern Irish English we have to go one’s dinger, meaning to do something vigorously or boisterously, or to lose one’s temper in a spectacular way. Australian and New Zealand English give us the somewhat mysterious Gentle Annie, a name for any steep hill or incline, and perhaps an ironic reference to a mid-nineteenth-century American popular song of that name; the whole box and dice, a phrase meaning ‘a group of things or people in its entirety, everything’; and (from Australia alone) a dingo’s breakfast, a humorous way of saying ‘no breakfast at all’, or referring to a set of very basic morning rituals in which breakfast is not included. South Asia gives us a new sense of abstain, meaning to absent oneself from work or school. Nigerian cookery offers chin-chin, a snack consisting of strips of deep-fried dough, typically served sweetened.From my own home county of Lancashire we have (from) clogs to clogs (in three generations), a gloomy assertion that a family that attains wealth in one generation will be back where it started by the third. Before my own luck runs out, I’ll conclude my opening statement, and move on to look at a selection of new material in this update in a little more detail…”

See also “Word of the Year 2020 – The Oxford Languages 2020 Word of the Year campaign looks a little different to previous years. The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year. Our team of expert lexicographers have captured and analysed this lexical data every step of the way. As our Word of the Year process started and this data was opened up, it quickly became apparent that 2020 is not a year that could neatly be accommodated in one single “word of the year”, so we have decided to report more expansively on the phenomenal breadth of language change and development over the year in our Words of an Unprecedented Year report…”