'Rizz,' 'lost in the sauce,' and Dictionary.com's newest words, with Steve Johnson

Adding 5900 words to the dictionary

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Steve Johnson, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. Steve, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your role at Dictionary.com and why you're here today, because I hear you have like this big word drop. Yeah. So I'm the director of lexicography for Dictionary.com. So I pretty much kind of to run the strategy of which words get added to the dictionary. We just had a major word drop

0:34where we added 5,900 new words to the dictionary. So we've been working very, very hard since the beginning of the year to get new words added. Why was this one so big? Were there so many new words or was there something that made it more possible for you to do so many more this time? No, that's a great question. One of the things that we've been really focused on over the last few years is making sure to upgrade our tech so that we really have the time for our lexicographers to focus on what they do best, which is really focusing on the new words rather than how to

1:08input them, worrying about different types of tagging and any of the tech issues that can come up and just take a lot of time. Just really getting a lot of words that are out there that we had, you know, a backlog that we were waiting to release. What was the most surprising theme across this year's new words? I think that probably one of the most surprising themes for me is just looking at how many different areas of vocabulary is coming from. So we have a lot of words that are coming from health,

1:41from medicine, from science, technology, a lot of things with AI. But we also have, you know, things related to relationships, food, slang. So just really telling the story about how everyone is experiencing the world.

Social media and online slang

1:57Yeah. How is social media and AI sort of changing what you're seeing in the words that people are using? Or is it not? Well, I think social media is pretty interesting because a lot of the words that we have are based on our kind of digital experiences that we have. It could be anything from having like a reply guy in comments. It can be, you know, something like a face reveal, which is something that we wouldn't be able to do outside of a digital space because when we're talking to people, we obviously are

2:27usually face to face. So just having these new terms to describe like new realities that we have socially is where we see a lot of changes. There was a new slang term that I honestly, I would have thought it meant Starbucks. It's STBX. Like, what does that mean? The soon to be X. Yeah. So like, you see this in a lot of online forums, particularly areas like Reddit, where if you're a part of the community, you pick up on all of these acronyms. But outside

2:59of that, it's just, I have no idea what this means. And so yeah, so that's something where you're describing people kind of shorthand, you know, using an abbreviation by it's assumed to be X. Yeah. I don't use Reddit much. So that explains maybe why I haven't seen that one before. Are there more abbreviations like that that you're seeing lately? Oh yeah. I mean, Reddit has its own dictionary of different types of abbreviations. I remember one of the first ones that I remember when I encountered it, I thought it was funny. It's

3:30the acronym for if you know, you know. Because if you don't know what that acronym stands for, you have no idea what it is. And so it's kind of a bit meta in that way. But yeah, so any of those, you know, can be really challenging if you're not in on the inside joke, if you don't actually know what those are supposed to stand for. It makes it really hard to be a user and participate in a forum like that if you don't know the use. Do you have people who specialize in different areas? Like I know you also have

4:02a lot of new words from science and medicine. I imagine it's not the same people working on those words as working on internet slang. Yeah. So we definitely have lexicographers that have specializations. One of our lexicographers like focuses on a lot of the science terms and she loves working through like the sets of science. In particular, I really like working on the science vocabulary since I came through. I started in chemical engineering before I turned to linguistics. And so I really, in particular, like a lot of

4:33kind of the chemistry related terms, like allows me to look at my past somewhat. Yeah, that's right. I was a biologist before I came to language. And I noted that biology terms were the biggest chunk of the new science and medicine. And it did make me wonder, like, are there more new words in biology this time? Or did you just have like a backlog of biology words? Oh, we're just focusing on trying to get a lot of the words that are out. We found a lot with probably biology and also mental health terms that have been particularly popular. And so sometimes

5:08things just kind of come and go with the trends. Yeah. Well, let's actually go back to slang because everyone always thinks that's really fun. Was there anything noticeably different about the online language or slang you've seen this year compared to previous years? Compared to previous years, I think that it generally matches what we normally get. However, one of my favorite things is when you have a slang expression and it starts to kind of continue to change in form and grow. So we have chonky, for example, which is very cute,

5:39like, you know, term adjective for a pet, but then you have like chonker and then you have chonk. And so like how that derives afterwards, I think is really interesting. And so I think that those are just make for fun moments. I would say a lot of multi-word expressions that have just had sticking power when they don't normally. So lost in the sauce is one of my favorites that we added in this kind of round. It's been around for a while, but it's just one of those that's fun and just had

6:10staying power. Tell people what it means. So if you're lost in the sauce, it's like when you're clueless or confused, you could be disoriented. It's something that, you know, is kind of connected to being inebriated if you've drunk too much, had too much. Oh, the sauce. Had too much sauce. Yeah. I would not have made that connection. That's great. Is that where it comes from? Yeah. So like sauce being a slang term for like liquor. Yeah. Nice. And so you have like related expressions, like off the sauce and stuff like that as well.

The process of selecting slang

6:42Fun. It seems like slang words are being added to the dictionary more than they used to be. And I did see someone last week say like, I don't want slang in my dictionary. And I'm like, well, I don't know. I kind of do. But like, there's this feeling that some people, like maybe some of the slang is moving too fast. Like how, how do you decide what slang should go in the dictionary and how much slang you're going to put in there? Yeah. So I think that when looking at slang, it's always moved really fast. And that's one

7:14of the characteristics of it. I think that the biggest difference that we're seeing is that people can notice it now, especially when you're looking at trends like, and forums like TikTok, where you just have a lot of users that are able to share things much more rapidly in the past. When coming up with words to add to the dictionary, it's actually pretty challenging. Because we have a finite number of lexicographers, you know, finite number of hours in our week. And so we do have to prioritize which words, you know, we want to add. And, you know, it's not an easy task or an easy job.

7:49But really, when it comes down to it, we want to make sure that anything that we add, first off, it has to be something that's used by a lot of people. It has to be something that has, you know, pretty fixed meaning amongst the different groups of people. And we want it to be something that's going to be useful to a general audience. And it's that kind of feature of it being useful. And then, of course, we also want it to generally be something that's long lasting. And slang can be very ephemeral. So that's where it becomes particularly challenging

8:20with slang, figuring out how much saying power does that word have to have before it's like ready to go in the dictionary. At dictionary.com, we have actually a slang dictionary for ones that we're not sure whether we want to add this to the regular dictionary yet. And so we do have a cultural dictionary where we add terms where we're not sure we can reevaluate those. And then we're like, yep, this is here to stay. Oh, so it's kind of like the minor leagues for words. Pretty much. Yeah. So like, one of the ones that we had in kind of that, basically that

8:54slang dictionary for a while was throw hands. And you're just like, is this going to stay around, you know, so throw hands, basically, as a slang, that means to physically fight. And so we didn't know if that was going to stay around or not. So we had that in the slang dictionary. And then it's just like, people are still throwing hands years later. So time to head into the regular dictionary.

9:16So did most of the slang words that are in the regular dictionary start in the like lesser, just online? Yeah, so a lot of them do start in our cultural dictionary. So no cap was a good example. Like, you know, we had this because we, lots of people were looking it up, like, what does no cap mean? I, when I first encountered it, I could not have even guessed what it meant. So for

9:46those that don't know, like, no cap is a slang that means honestly, no lie, no exaggeration. And so without knowing what it is, you have to look it up. And that's what we have the dictionary for. And so we wanted to make sure that it was there, so that it could be useful. We didn't know how long it would be around. So we put it in the slang dictionary. And then it's just like, this is still being used regularly. Time to move it to give it its proper place. I wonder if like internally, you have bets or,

10:17you know, you should have like a pool about which words are going to make it from the minor league up to the major league. Oh, yeah. Some of the lexicographers on the team, we definitely have things that there's sometimes resistance among some of us. So my colleague, Anna, she really did not want Riz added to, you know, some phrases short for charisma. It's used a lot with Gen Alpha. And she was just, do not add Riz to the dictionary. Don't do it. And then it just had

10:48that staying power. And so it's just like, okay, it's going to be added. So is it a committee decision for every word like that? Not every word. We, you know, regularly just look at a lot of data. So we generally have two main sources of data that we can look at. So one, we can look at just the frequency of words in corpora, and we'll look at change of frequency over time. And so you can generally see like this word is just appearing more and more frequently across different types of publications. And so that's a pretty good signal that it's time to add a word. Another thing that we

11:20can look at is user search data. So we can look at actually what users coming to the site looking for words are actually searching for. And when a word is searched for often enough, it seems to be a clear indication that it's ready to be added since there's obviously a need or a use for it. That's great. Yeah. Bringing up words of the year reminds, or the corpora frequency reminds me, you always have the words of the year. And I imagine you're starting to look at that now already, right? We are starting to look at that now. Yeah. So it's that time of year where,

11:52you know, we track starting at the beginning of the year, we actually have a list and we like add more and more words throughout the year. And this is around the time that we start trying to figure out what's going to be on our short list. I noticed that one of your podcasts the other day had maxing as that topic. And I mean, that's been around, you know, a lot this year. But, you know, there have been so many different types of trends this year. So anything from Odyssey being out because of the movie, things like data centers being,

12:24you know, in the news a lot. So we still also have an election coming up. So if there are any October surprises, we often get political words that enter into the race kind of last minute. Yeah. When's sort of the cutoff date for picking? We try to, you know, just depends year to year. Like some years, it's a very clear choice because of the way things are trending. So last year, when we chose 6-7 as word of the year, it had been just huge, like starting at the beginning of September, just like really took

12:56off and it was just not losing steam. And so it seemed like a very obvious choice. The year before that, demure, like was definitely had been on the rise through the summer. Things were very cutesy, things were very demure. And so we had a pretty good indication, but there are also, you know, like Brat Summer from Charlie XCX. So, you know, there were a lot of contenders that year, but last year it was really clear. So we tried to try to see how things are going to go by around mid-October. Yeah. I know you won't tell me the word or even the ones in contention, but it feels

13:31to me like there's not such a clear choice this year. Is that right? Yeah. This year has been interesting because like there's generally the same sources. So you have things that are come from like politics. You have things that come from slang because those are really what you see a lot in the news. It's what's affecting people day to day. But yeah, I feel like there hasn't been nearly as strong of a term as there was like last year. Like 6-7 was just overwhelmingly everywhere. So yeah, we'll see. Have about another month and a half. Yeah. We'll be watching. What are some of your

AI terms and food borrowings

14:03other favorite words from this new word drop? So I really love Star Wars. And so there was Padawan that we added to the dictionary. I like Lord of the Rings, so we added Balrog. And so those are two of my favorite terms coming from like those kind of fandom communities, so to speak. But I also thought that it was really interesting, some of the AI terms. So AI slop has been around, that's been increasing in usage, kind of formalizing it as its own term in the dictionary is one that we had.

14:36But a lot of the different language that's describing our interactions with technology and with AI specifically, I think have been really important. So for example, overprompting is one of the terms that we had. And one of the reasons that I really like this term is because it really shows what our human impulse is. So for overprompting, it's what happens when basically you provide artificial intelligence with an excessive amount of instruction. And it gives more and more negative

15:08output. Because if something isn't working, you're like, I just need to tell it more. I just need to give it more instruction. And so what ends up happening is you're creating this like feedback loop where you're like putting more in and getting something worse and worse out. And so it's, I think, an interesting experience for how we're like learning to navigate and use AI kind of as a tool and having a term to describe that. Yeah, that is interesting. And, you know, I know some people are concerned about AI sort of leveling language. You know, if we're seeing so much AI output, it's all kind of very, has a very sameness to it.

15:44And also you can like imagine the different models have their own styles almost, you know, so you're always hearing like, that's on me, or, you know, that's a load bearing question or something like that. And then these phrases that appear over and over again in AI output, you know, are you seeing anything in your data that seems to be influenced by AI? I think that that's just one interesting question. But I think that as you have more, that's the same. This is like really where you see the role of creativity, and why it's so important to be creative.

16:18And I think that that's also why things like the Gen Alpha slang that people think is really crazy, you know, you know, skibbity, for example, is why it stands out so much because of how creative it is. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of pushback, you know, towards, you know, fighting against that conformity, which, you know, there regularly is. So I think that that's like really where we really shine with creativity is with slang. Yeah, I hope so. So you're not really seeing any sort of leveling in the kinds of words that people are searching for, it sounds like.

16:49Not yet. Not yet. So I think that we have plenty of time before that. Super. Yeah. Oh, and I was looking back at my notes. You also have a lot of borrowings this time. And I want to try a, what is it, a quesabria. That sounds delicious. Yeah. So, yeah, I live in San Diego. And so I'm all about the food and we have just amazing Mexican food being, you know, so close to the border. So, yeah, quesabria is particularly delicious. Yeah. And what are some of your other favorite borrowings that are in there?

17:20So a lot of the borrowings that we had were really from food. And so it's like around lunchtime. So now I'm going to get hungry. But yeah, so it's just one of those things that you can have a lot of food terms in particular that for whatever reason, just take a while, even if they're very popular. So here we have elote, which is corn. It's kind of a street corn dish that I think is absolutely delicious. But even something as simple as like garlic not exists forever. But like just

17:55noticed that it was missing from the dictionary, decided that it was time to add it. So we get a lot of words around lunchtime from our lexicographers. It's like, you know, we don't have this in the dictionaries. It's like, what are you searching for? Making your lunch order. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, when I know like you just finished, but when will your next word drop be? Yeah. So, you know, it's a little bit different every year, but we usually have it around, you know, before the holidays hit. So just have to wait and see.

18:26Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for telling us about these new words today. It's always fun to hear about them. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people about what they should be looking for in the updates or how they can use the dictionary? Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things that people kind of don't realize is that, you know, anytime we have a new word in the dictionary, it's not necessarily new. It's something that's generally been a while. It's just takes a while for it to get enough usage and update, but really anyone can create new words. So I'm very big at encouraging, you know, people to, you know,

18:58make their own neologism, especially with your group of friends, like use it amongst not only yourselves, but, you know, use it with others. A lot of people tend to keep a lot of words in the group, but, you know, everyone has the ability to impact and change the English language. Yeah. We call those familects or friendelects on the Grammar Girl podcast. We play them at the end of all my scripted shows. And actually, listeners, we need more. I need more familects or friendelects. So send those in. The instructions on how to do that will be in the show notes. So thanks for, like, queuing that up for me, Steve.

19:31No, it's like one of the things that I've added to my friend's group is the word shonky, which came from Australian slang. Have you heard of this before? Sure. So it basically kind of fits where the word kind of like janky ends, where something is of like dubious or low quality, and it's kind of like sketchy and questionable. But instead of using it for like inanimate objects, it can also like refer to a person. So for example, if you're working with a contractor who tapes up a door that's broken, and it's mixed with like, like tape, you might say that

20:07that door is janky. But the person that like the contractor that did the work, he's a little shonky. Oh, nice. Nice. I like it. Okay, well, Steve Johnson from dictionary.com. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And if you're a Grammar Pelusian, we're going to have a bonus section where we're going to get Steve's book recommendations. So look for that in your feed. If you'd like to become a Grammar Pelusian and get those bonuses right away, you can sign up at patreon.com slash Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.