'Twerk', 'Selfie' now part of Oxford online dictionary

Published August 28, 2013 2:19pm

Suddenly, Miley Cyrus’ controversial act at the MTV Video Music Awards just got academic: the word “twerk” has been added to the official list of words of Oxford Dictionaries Online.

Cyrus’ dance was among the new words related to technology and social media that were added to the dictionary, joining another popular word related to social networking: “selfie.”

“Picture this. You’ve just uploaded a selfie to your favourite social media website using your phablet when your FIL (that’s your father-in-law) shares a supercut of a srsly mortifying twerking session. You immediately unlike his page because there isn’t an emoji capable of expressing your desire to vom: apols, but it’s time for a digital detox. Research by the Oxford Dictionaries team shows that these terms have been absorbed by popular culture, hence their inclusion in the latest ODO update,” Oxford Dictionaries Online said.

Angus Stevenson of Oxford Dictionaries Online said new words, senses, and phrases are added to Oxford Dictionaries Online “when we have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English.”

“Each month, we add about 150 million words to our corpus database of English usage examples collected from sources around the world. We use this database to track and verify new and emerging words and senses on a daily basis. On average, we add approximately 1,000 new entries to Oxford Dictionaries Online every year, and this quarter’s update highlights some fascinating developments in the English language,” Stevenson added.

Mashable cited example sentences where Oxford Dictionaries “lists ‘Just wait till they catch their daughters twerking to this song’ and ‘Twerk it girl, work it girl.’ The term originated in the 1990s, according to the new entry,” tech site Mashable reported.

As defined by the dictionary, to twerk means to “dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance,” Mashable said.

On the other hand, the dictionary defined a selfie as a “photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” it added.

Mashable noted other popular tech and social media-related words such as digital detox, Bitcoin, BYOD, emoji, FOMO, geek chic, hackerspace, phablet, srsly and TL;DR, also joined the list of words in the dictionary.

The dictionary considers “twerk” as a verb, and added it to recent techspeak like lolz, sexting, totes, OMG and LOL; and even cultural words like mankini and jeggings.

Other new words in the dictionary include:

Digital detox: a time where a person refrains from using electronic devices like smartphones or computers, to reduce stress or engage in interaction in the physical world.
Bitcoin: a decentralized digital currency.
BYOD: short for “Bring Your Own Device,” or letting employees bring their own phones or computers to work.
Emoji: a small digital image or icon to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication.
FOMO: short for "Fear of missing out,” referring to anxiety that something interesting may be happening elsewhere.
Click and collect: a shopping facility where a customer can buy or order goods from a store’s website then collect them from a local branch.
Geek chic: Dressing associated with computing and technology enthusiasts.
Hackerspace: a place where people interested in computing or technology can gather to work on projects while sharing ideas and equipment.
Internet of things: a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data."
MOOC: a course made available over the Internet free, to a large number of people.
Phablet: short for smartphone and tablet, a device whose size ranges between a smartphone and a tablet.
Srsly: short for “seriously.”
TL;DR: short for “Too long didn’t read,” as a dismissal of a long online post.

— TJD, GMA News

Tags: mileycyrus, twerking, dictionary