Mansplaining, snowflake and hangry - the new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary

Mansplaining, ransomware and snowflake are among the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – along with more than 100 parenting terms.

A list of 1,000 new entries in the OED includes the terms ‘hangry’ – when someone is “bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger” – and ‘me time’, describing someone devoting time to do what they want in order to relax.

The latest version of the renowned guide of more than 829,000 words, senses and compounds, also includes a number of initialisms commonly used online, like TTC (trying to conceive) or CIO (cry it out) as a way of training a baby to sleep.

To qualify for the list the OED requires several independent examples of a word being used and evidence that it has been in use “for a reasonable amount of time”.

Researchers often consult experts in a particular field and in the latest update, the team spoke to contributors to the online parenting forum Mumsnet to capture the developments in the English language that have risen around childbirth.

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New entries also include references to pregnancy results, including a BFN (big fat negative) or a BFP (big fat positive).

Researchers traced the use of ‘mansplain’, typically used to describe a man explaining something “needlessly, overbearingly, or condescendingly, especially to a woman, in a manner thought to reveal a patronising or chauvinistic attitude”, to a web forum in an exchange between a man and a woman in 2008.

The term snowflake has taken on a less-than-complimentary meaning, especially on social media, earning it an additional definition as someone who is “overly sensitive or as feeling entitled to special treatment or consideration”.

Ransomware is also among the new additions – less than a year since the NHS was one of a number of global institutions to fall victim to the WannaCry cyber attack that was carried out using malicious software.

OED Senior Editor Fi Mooring said: “These words reflect personal experiences but many of them also resonate much more widely, even with people who are not parents.

“The distinctive lexicon of parenting maps a whole range of human experience, from immense joy to immeasurable sorrow and, considering its relevance to so much of the population it seemed an underrepresented category of vocabulary in the Dictionary.”