When Merriam-Webster announced that its word of the year for 2023 was "authentic," it did so with over a month to go in the calendar year.
Social Sciences
Nov 28, 2023
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1
Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word "bastard"—why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare's time, "bastard" was a technical term describing certain plants.
Mathematics
Sep 7, 2023
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4
William Shakespeare used the word "dotage" to capture reduced mental ability (as in being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age, "successes" were really outcomes—one could talk of a "bad success"—and ...
Education
Aug 23, 2023
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43
Dad bod, amirite, TBH and FTW are now dictionary-appropriate.
Social Sciences
Oct 29, 2021
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18
Online translation tools have helped us learn new languages, communicate across linguistic borders, and view foreign websites in our native tongue. But the artificial intelligence (AI) behind them is far from perfect, often ...
Social Sciences
Mar 31, 2021
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2
Over the past decade, selfies have become a mainstay of popular culture. If the #selfie hashtag first appeared in 2004, it was the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010 that saw the pictures go viral. Three years later, the Oxford ...
Social Sciences
Mar 30, 2021
1
61
Disastrous fires, ongoing drought, and heat extremes have refocused Australians' attention on the human contribution to climate change.
Environment
Jan 30, 2020
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9
Tell your bae or your bestie: The mobile game Words With Friends is adding thousands of pop culture words as part of its largest dictionary update in the game's eight-year history.
Internet
Sep 19, 2017
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7
Truth seems to be an increasingly flexible concept in politics. At least that's the impression the Oxford English Dictionary gave recently, as it declared "post-truth" the 2016 Word of the Year. What happens when decisions ...
Social Sciences
Dec 14, 2016
2
23
When the Oxford English Dictionary declared an emoji its 2015 word of the year, it was a bit of a head-scratcher.
Internet
Feb 10, 2016
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17
