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“Internet culture is changing the English language and the
effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,”
said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge
Dictionary, the world’s largest online dictionary.
“Skibidi” is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an
animated YouTube series and can mean “cool” or “bad” or be used
with no real meaning as a joke.
Other planned additions include “tradwife," a contraction of
“traditional wife” referring to a married mother who cooks,
cleans and posts on social media, and "delulu,” a shortening of
the word delusional that means “believing things that are not
real or true, usually because you choose to.”
Christian Ilbury, senior lecturer in sociolinguistics at the
University of Edinburgh, said many of the new words are tied to
social media platforms like TikTok because that is how most
young people communicate.
However, Ilbury said some of the words, including “delulu,” have
longer histories than people might think and have been used by
speech communities for years.
“It’s really just the increase in visibility and potential
uptake amongst communities who may not have engaged with those
words before,” he explained.
An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the
new dictionary entry “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of
software used to make it seem like you are working when you are
not.
Environmental concerns are behind the addition of “forever
chemical,” a harmful substance that remains in the environment
for a long time.
Cambridge Dictionary uses the Cambridge English Corpus, a
database of more than 2 billion words of written and spoken
English, to monitor how new words are used by different people,
how often and in what contexts they are used, the company said.
“If you look at what a dictionary’s function is, it’s a public
record of how people use language and so if people are now using
words like ‘skibidi’ or ‘delulu,’ then the dictionary should
take account of that,” Ilbury said.
McIntosh added the dictionary has only added words it thinks
have “staying power.”
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