New words added to Oxford English Dictionary
“Wokery”, and “forever chemical” have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its latest update.
The OED is updated quarterly with new words, senses and revisions to entries, to reflect changes in word usage and to include new terms relating to current events and trends.
The December 2023 update, announced, features new words related to technology, polluting chemicals, politics, and literature.
“Wokery” and “wokeism”, disparaging nouns meaning “progressive or leftwing attitudes or practices, esp. those opposing social injustice or discrimination, that are viewed as doctrinaire, self-righteous, pernicious, or insincere”, were added. Another definition of “wokery”, denoting a restaurant, food counter, or kitchen serving dishes using a wok, was also included in the update, The Guardian reported.
Another politics-related term, “chumocracy”, also features. It is said to mean a culture characterised or dominated by “influential networks of close friends”, and has previously been used to describe British politics.
A number of technology- and internet-related words were added, including “screen-share”, “generative artificial intelligence” and “talkboard”, meaning an online forum or chat room.
“Forever chemical” and “PFAS” were also added. These words describe synthetic compounds, for example those used in cookware for their non-stick properties, that do not break down in the environment.
Literary terms also made it into this update. One was “Gradgrindian”, an adjective used to describe something that is characteristic of Thomas Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Hard Times,’ or “hard and cold, and solely concerned with facts; oppressively
utilitarian”.
A second bookish term was “Chekhov’s gun”, a literary principle articulated by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov which holds that unnecessary elements should not be introduced into a story. Chekhov said that, as an example, a gun should not be mentioned in a play if it is not going to be fired later. The OED notes that the principle has been often criticised, and “some have also observed that it does not seem to be applied consistently even in Chekhov’s own output”.