LONDON — Don’t know what “vaping” is? How about “listicle”?
Perhaps it’s time to get to know them. Britain’s Oxford University Press said today it is adding the words — along with other new entries, from “time-poor” to “Paleo diet” — to its online Oxford Dictionaries to reflect new language trends.
Editors for the site track and analyze some 150 million English words used online, in newspapers and other sources, and once every few months they decide which new words are so widely used that they merit a dictionary entry.
“These are words that are common enough that you are likely to encounter them, and may have to look up their meanings,” said Oxford Dictionaries editor Katherine Martin.
One of these is “vape” or “vaping,” which describes inhaling smokeless nicotine vapor using e-cigarettes. Oxford Dictionaries researchers say the usage of both “vape” and “e-cig” has increased about 10 times in the past two years.