‘Revenge porn’ and ‘dox’ are among the 2,000 words just added to the dictionary

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"Revenge porn," "TMI," and "trigger warning" were among the 2,000 new words and definitions that just got added to the more than 490,000 entries in Merriam-Webster Unabridged on Wednesday April 20.

Of the 2,000 new additions, 1,400 are new terms and phrases while about 700 evolved from existing terms. For example, "trigger warning" was added to the verb "trigger."

"Words come into existence easily and all the time," Emily Brewster, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, tells Tech Insider in an email. "Whether or not a new word or sense is ready for entry is determined by an examination of the evidence of the word in use."

In a blog post, Merriam-Webster points out that many of the words come from the tech world and internet slang. For instance, "dox" (to publicly identify or publicize private information), "nomophobia" (fear of being without a working cell phone), and "FOMO" (fear of missing out) are all being added to the dictionary.

The way in which a word gets added to the dictionary is kept intentionally vague, Brewster explains, but any word that the deciding team sees over and over again in print is considered for entry.

"A term like 'dox' gets entered relatively quickly — our earliest evidence of it in use is from 2009 — because we have plenty of evidence of it in mainstream publications," Brewster says.

"We’d been collecting evidence of hella, on the other hand, for much longer; it’s the kind of word that rarely appears in published, edited text, and that therefore simmers at the fringes of the language for a long time before we consider it fully established," she says.

New additions will also include digital currency "Bitcoin" and "athleisure," which has apparently been used to describe casual clothing that you can wear to the gym since 1976. Who knew?

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You can see more of the words that were added on April 20 on Merriam-Webster’s website.

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