word submissions

Lucy Mangan has a wrunkle about wanle and other new CollinsDictionary.com word submissions

Isn’t that always the way? You wait six months for a decent acronym and then two come along at once! Let’s begin with Gavin’s “WILLIE” (sorry, Gavin, but you didn’t really expect me to resist that, did you?). It stands for “Works in London, lives in Edinburgh”. I’ve… Read More

Thanks to your word submissions, Lucy Mangan is now an expert is the ancient art of ‘washigami’

Sometimes I feel that I am more therapist than word-nerdery-repositress-slash-neologism-sentinel. Sometimes the words and the definitions that cross my path seem less contributions to the global word stock than howling cries of pain from hearts that lie bleeding on the page. And so we turn – slowly, gently, in a… Read More

Lucy Mangan is LIMH at this week’s new CollinsDictionary.com word submissions!

Thank you, tyler.hartleb, thank you for supplying the abbreviation I have needed my whole digital life: ‘LIMH‘. It stands for “Laughing in my head” and thus at last gives an almost literally voiceless community a voice. Or at least a presence, which is actually all we really want. Read More

Lucy Mangan is going on a ‘microadventure’. No ‘wackaging’ involved

We get the technology we deserve. In the pipeline (or it may be already here – my toddler is ill, I haven’t been outside for a week and I don’t know anyone over three or under 30 who can keep me up to date, so who knows what’s happening?) is… Read More

Lucy Mangan learns some new words from the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as a new type of pasta

So, it looks like there may be an English word for schadenfreude after all. According to WritersCramp, it’s ‘epicaricacy‘ and covers the same convulsion of joy in another’s misfortune that the Teutonic loan does. What we lose in “Tuh – trust the Germans to have a word for… Read More

Lucy Mangan considers ‘komorebi’, ‘sitzfleisch’, and the proper pronunciation of ‘dog’…

Thank you so much, Colin T. McDonough, for submitting ‘komorebi‘. It’s a Japanese word that means “sunlight that filters through the trees – the interplay between light and leaves”. It’s mentioned in many places as being one of those ‘untranslatable’ words – which is to say, ones whose… Read More

Lucy Mangan takes on the new CollinsDictionary.com word submissions

Sometimes I regret forsaking the life of regular income, pension contributions, paid leave, office banter, sexual intrigue and people bringing cakes in that I used to have when I worked for a city solicitors, for the solitary, impecunious, banterless, cakeless life of a freelance writer (as for the intrigue, forget… Read More

We’re off for a bit of wreckreation, followed by a bunny chow. Welcome to Lucy Mangan’s latest CollinsDictionary.com article!

In the Venn diagram of life there is for some reason I leave it to sociologists, psychologists and other people better qualified than I to fathom, a substantial overlap between eco-sensibility and word nerdery. I mean, I recycle everything, haven’t turned the heating on yet, and look at the sentence… Read More

Watch out, Lucy Mangan’s about! Read her take on the first batch of submitted words of the New Year!

As the new year wears on, we will probably have less need of it but while the scent of resolution and self-denial still hangs dispiritingly in the air, you might be in need of dingcap’s submission to our first batch of new dictionary entrants for 2014, “brunner” –… Read More