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2010's New Words

Fellow word lovers, I thought you might like to see a sample of the new words, phrases, and abbreviations that were added to 2010 New Oxford American Dictionary. So it’s official, you can now use BFF and bromance in your novel, and your editor will just have to shrug it off.

BFF: slang for best friend forever, a girl’s best friend

bromance: a close but nonsexual relationship between two men

cloud computing: the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer

credit crunch: a sudden sharp reduction in the availability of money or credit from banks and other lenders

defriend, unfriend:
remove someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site

green audit: an assessment of a business in terms of its impact on the environment

hashtag: a hash or pound sign (#) used to identify a particular keyword or phrase in a posting on social networking websites such as Twitter

homeshoring, homesourcing: the practice of transferring employment that was previously carried out in a company’s office or factory to employees’ homes (origin: opposite of offshoring)

lipstick lesbian: a lesbian who favors a glamorous, traditionally feminine style

LMAO: slang for laughing my ass off

social networking: the use of dedicated websites and applications to communicate informally with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself

staycation:
a vacation spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions

steampunk: a genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology

tramp stamp: a tattoo on a woman’s lower back

TTYL: slang for talk to you later

vuvuzela: a long horn blown by fans at a soccer match

What new words are you using in your writing and blogging?

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L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist, editor, and the author of the Detective Jackson mysteries, The Sex Club , Secrets to Die For, and Thrilled to Death, and two standalone thrillers, The Baby Thief and The Suicide Effect. All are available on Kindle for $2.99. She also loves to edit fiction and works with authors to keep her rates affordable. Contact her at:
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Comments

  1. got to add those new words to my word list. Thanks for the updates.

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  2. I wouldn't call myself hip, but I knew all but two of those! Yay. Thanks LJ.

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  3. Hormsourcing? (Was that supposed to be homesourcing?) That's new to me. And so was tramp stamp. I still see "hooking up" being used by old farts and always think to myself, "not in your fondest dreams." LOL.

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  4. So interesting to see how our language evolves with the social networking era!

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  5. Never thought I would see texting shortcuts added to the dictionary. I must be a real curmudgeon, but I don't like all the short cuts in common usage now. Non-fic for non-fiction, 'puter for computer, etc. Do we not have time to say complete words anymore?

    Going back to my cave now. LOL

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  6. What a wonderful list. Thanks for sharing. It's always interesting to see how our world is changing, and what better way than through tracking new OED words.

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  7. And talk about a good way to date your novel, using these terms! I always get a chuckle out of authors who HAD to include Write.Like.This. in their works, whether modern or historical settings. What will readers think in ten years?

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  8. Great list, LJ! Thanks for sharing. Several of those terms were new to me. The language is always evolving, which makes it dynamic, as it should be, responding to what's happening around us, rather than static, hiding its head in the sand.

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  9. Great list of new words - although I guess I didn't realize some of those weren't previously "recognized" as they're used all the time.

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  10. About half these words are completely new to me. I've seen tramp stamps on young women before and looked as closely as I could without getting arrested or punched out, but never knew there was a name for them. The phrase seems apt. But I will fall to my knees and pray every night that "refudiate" never makes it to the OED.

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  11. Don't forget to add http://www.urbandictionary.com to your resource list. If you're writing YA, check it often!

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  12. I love "tramp stamp". Amongst my work colleagues, there is a male equivalent - "tough stickers".

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  13. It's very interesting the way they do it on i Iceland. Since there are only 300.000 people in the world speaking Icelandic, the work hard to protect their language. International words, borrowed mostly from English, are not legal. So they have a committee that invents new Icelandic words for all kinds of new inventions like computer and internet and so on >:)

    Cold As Heaven

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  14. Thank you L.J. for taking the time to research these words. I used to use the word Trekkie as an example of words that were so commonly used they were made legitimate words. This was while providing training overseas. Now, I have a few more to use as examples. Some are pretty funny, LMAO!

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