Old but new story...

Did you know that the OED is updated four times a year? Every March, June, September and December.
Yeah! Yeah! I know this is not totally new but it is for some individuals.

The material added to the dictionary includes revised versions of existing entries (which replace the older versions), and new words and senses both within the alphabetical sequence of revised entries and also across the whole A to Z range.

Published quarterly since 2000, the updates make up the Third Edition of the OED.

March 2017 update

More than 500 new words, phrases, and senses have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary this quarter, including hate-watch, pogonophobia, sticky-outy, and things aren’t what they used to be.




 hate-watch,

a 21st-century verb meaning ‘to watch (a television programme, etc.) in a spirit of mockery, as a form of entertainment’.

pogonophobia,

a jocular term for a strong dislike of beards that was coined in 1857 but may be more relevant than ever given the current proliferation of barbigerous hipsters; and heliopause, the astronomical term for the very outer edge of the solar system beyond which the solar wind is undetectable, a boundary traversed by the touch of humanity for the first time in 2012, when the Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed it to enter interstellar space.


Sticky-outy, adjective

The charmingly colloquial adjective sticky-outy means ‘that protrudes or sticks out’, elaborating upon the form of the synonymous earlier word sticky-out by adding an additional –y. The OED’s first citation comes from a letter written by the Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger to his mother in 1921, lamenting ‘My hair has taken a wild fit, all sticky-outy in ends.’ Indeed, Grainger’s hair was notable for its sticky-outiness, as photographs of him from this period attest.


Things aren’t what they used to be,

English-speakers have been lamenting that things aren’t what they used to be, expressing the idea that circumstances or standards have deteriorated over time, since at least 1847, but the phrase enters the OED for the first time today. The entry’s quotation evidence reveals the term’s contradictory connotations. In literature, this statement of nostalgia for a better time in one’s youth is often put in the mouth of an old-timer depicted as speaking regional or colloquial varieties of English, so the quotation paragraph for OED’s entry includes nonstandard versions of the phrase, such as ‘things ain’t now as they used to was’ and ‘fings ain’t wot they used T’be,’ as well as formal versions like ‘things weren’t what they had once been’.  However it was uttered, by 1926 the wistful expression of attachment to bygone days had become such a well-established trope that it began to be used to critique nostalgia rather than express it: ‘Things aren’t what they were!.. They never were!’


That's it for now. In further posts, I'll enlist the new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Happy New Month to you.

Source: www.google.com/public.oed