new words

RNA vaccine and vision board highlight new words for March

19th Mar 2021

One year ago, in March 2020, there was a very clear theme linking many of the new words that were being added to Collins Dictionary. Terms such as social distancing, contact tracing, shutdown order, and… Read More

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

What a coronacoaster of a year!

10th Nov 2020

Over the last several months, when factories, offices, restaurants and other places of social gathering have been (intermittently) shut, people’s creativity has taken all sorts of unexpected directions. Anything goes in the quest to overcome that feeling of blursday, one uneventful day following another so that… 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

Air bridges and she-sheds offer positive vibe after lockdown

6th Jul 2020

After a year when many of the new words coming into the Collins Dictionary have involved measures to ensure public safety amid the coronavirus pandemic, the words that have arrived in June may hint at how people are planning to escape from lockdown and re-establish social activities. Some of the… 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