Oxford Dictionaries adds tweetable, dumbphone and FOSS to its latest editions

Oxford Dictionaries has announced its latest word additions and there’s a few more deserving utterances from the tech world in the February update.

Along with more regular language, the latest tech additions to the dictionary include; FOSS, touchless, dumbphone, SSD, social sharing and tweetable.

A topical addition following the debacle of The New York Times vs Tesla is ‘range anxiety’ described as “worry on the part of a person driving an electric car that the battery will run out of power before the destination or a suitable charging point is reached.”

Most of these terms would be familiar to those of us guilty of spending vast amounts of time online, but for those who need a helping hand and see the tech world as a place filled with impenetrable jargon, it’s nice to see these terms being added to the big book.

For those who are curious about etymology, The Oxford University Press often finds new words via the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme. The corpus is a collection of entire documents drawn mostly from the Web and the reading programme is an electronic collection of sentences or short extracts drawn from all sorts of places including song lyrics and popular fiction. New terms have to be recorded online or in print to be considered.

The rate at which words are added has also changed. New words used to be added if they were being used over two or three years, but now new terms travel fast online and lexicographers are moving much faster when making their assessments.

Amusingly the Oxford Press points out that people often send them words that they have made up themselves for inclusion in the dictionaries. Unfortunately for these inventive word nerds, the answer is usually no.

You can check out the new words added to the Oxford dictionaries here.

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