Latest Language

From sploot to EGOT: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

25th Feb 2021

Have you ever seen your pet sploot? You may well have done, even if you didn’t know that there was a word for it. This is what an animal does when, instead of tucking its legs neatly under its own body, it lies flat on its… Read More

From filk to derp: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

8th Jan 2021

Why do we need to keep adding new words to the English language? Can’t we just make do with the ones we have already? These are reasonable questions, but the fact is that new words do keep entering the language. To illustrate why this happens, let’s look at a cross-section… Read More

From hiraeth to washi: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

23rd Oct 2020

Language experts are in broad agreement that English has one of the richest vocabularies of any language. Speakers of English have about twice as many words at their disposal than speakers of Spanish or Chinese have. This abundance is due to the way English was born out of a collision… Read More

From moonshoot to balconing: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

30th Sep 2020

The online version of the Collins Dictionary has just been updated again, with another batch of new words and meanings inspired by the events of the summer. Perhaps the most newsworthy word of the past month was moonshot, which hit the headlines thanks to Boris Johnson using it in… Read More

From confirmation bias to owo: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

18th Aug 2020

The online version of the Collins Dictionary has just been updated again, with another batch of words being allowed in for the first time. These new words are a rather mixed bag, and they show the dictionary in both its serious and light-hearted moods. On the one hand, you can… Read More

From edgelords to niblings: discover the latest words added to the Collins Dictionary

20th May 2020

The latest crop of words added to the Collins Dictionary still contains a number of items that can be attributed to this year’s dominant coronavirus news story, but there are also words that have nothing to do with viruses, public health, or epidemiology. Nevertheless, it is true that the coronavirus… Read More

Five new words in Collins English Dictionary, December 2019

21st Dec 2019

Here are the editorial team’s favourite new words and meanings added to Collins English Dictionary online in December. daith Defined as “an ear piercing that forms a loop around the inner cartilage of the ear”, daith was selected by one of the editors largely for its… Read More