Of teraflops and petrichors
I don’t wait with bated breath for the lists of new words added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and Oxford English dictionaries each year, but I always smile when they arrive. 2025 additions were announced in late September: Oxford added more than 500 new words and phrases, and the 12th edition of Merriam-Webster contains more than 5,000 new entries.
To most of us struggling to correctly use the 60,000 words it’s said we learn over a lifetime — and some of us unable to pronounce common drug names — adding 10% more words may seem just plain futile. But editors feel it their duty to seek out and cite new words found in a variety of sources. Words that garner the most citations then are added to the new editions. And, yes, some words and phrases are eliminated if they are considered antiquated or not in common usage. For example, “snollygoster” — meaning an unscrupulous politician — was dumped from dictionaries back in 2023. Might be time to bring that one back.
Editors wait until words are in common usage to add them to online and printed dictionaries, so you’re probably familiar with many of the terms added to the 12th Merriam-Webster: “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “cancel culture,” and “dashcam.” Others may not come to mind quickly: perhaps “doomscroll” (continuously scrolling social media pages even when nothing interests you) or “side-eye” — that look you give someone beside you when they do or say something you don’t like, turning only your eyes, not your entire head. I have a great picture of our older dog side-eyeing the new puppy we acquired five years ago.
“Rizz” is rather new, and not a term I have ever or would ever use. It’s short for “charisma,” as in, “That guy really attracts chicks! He has a lot of rizz!” “WFH” is shorthand for “working from home,” something that remains popular five years after COVID-19 forced many of us to do so.
If you’re a video gamer, particularly one who uses Microsoft’s Xbox X, you may be interested to know that the X has 12 “teraflops,” a word added this year to the Oxford which means that the gaming console has the ability to perform 12 trillion floating point operations per second. In layman’s terms, that means you’ll die faster when you fight a boss. This usage has nothing to do with “Buccoflop,” which is a measure of how quickly the Pittsburgh Pirates fall below .500 each season.
You’ve probably dined “al fresco,” a fancy way to say you’re eating outdoors. But among my favorite new phrases added to the Oxford dictionary is something I’m willing to bet that many an office worker has done: “al desko,” meaning you’re eating at your desk or workstation.
Some new entries are so esoteric that it’s unlikely you’ll ever hear, let alone use them. For example, “woodpusher,” which the Oxford defines as being slang for “A chess player, esp. one who is unskilled or a novice.” And then there’s “petrichor,” which Webster defines as, “A distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall, especially when following a warm, dry period.”
I don’t know about you, but in our house we call that odor “wet-dog smell.”