News
Selfie, hashtag, and unfriend are now legit words
(Screenshot from @TheEllenShow, Ellen Degeneres’s Twitter profile)
Selfie, hashtag, and unfriend are just some of the new words you can find in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
150 words have been added to the dictionary this year. Many of them, unsurprisingly, are social media and tech terms.
Words like catfish, crowdfunding, tweep, and big data have made it to the list.
Social networking, a recent addition, is defined as “the creation and maintenance of personal and business relationships, especially online.”
“So many of these new words show the impact of online connectivity to our lives and livelihoods,” said Merriam-Webster’s Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski, in a press release.
Oxford Dictionary, however, already included selfie in August 2013. It was even named “word of the year.”
“One of the most important things we have to watch is the trendiness of language, so we don’t want to put a word in that will then have to come out,” Sokolowski said. “We want to make sure a word is here to stay.”
We’re guessing #selfie is immortal. What about the variations like shelfie and stealthie?
You can find more of Merriam-Webster’s new words here.
