Vuvuzela among 2,000 Oxford newbies
AFRICAN HORN instrument vuvuzela, the find of Fifa World Cup in South Africa, has been given official sanction and has entered the hallowed pages of the Oxford Dictionary of English.
The influence of social networking websites and the terminology they use has led to adoption of words like defriend, tweetup and microblogging, which is the posting of short entries on a blog, and dictionary attack, described as an attempt to gain illicit access to a computer system by using a very large set of words to generate potential passwords.
In all there are more than 2,000 new items in the third edition of the dictionary published on Thursday, which was originally published in 1998.
The global financial crisis has influenced the inclusion of words like toxic debt, which is a debt with a high risk of default, and quantitative easing, the introduction of new money into the national supply by a nation’s central bank, to the official English lexicon.
Close relationship between males, but a non-sexual one, is described as a bromance and frenemy is a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry.
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