'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

https://news.sky.com/story/tradwife-delulu-and-skibidi-among-new-words-added-to-cambridge-dictionary-13412150

by austinallegro • 11 months ago

41 38 11 months ago

news.sky.com

morjom• 11 months ago

Don't "regular" dictionaries like the Cambridge and Oxford ones usually avoid adding slang?

cjs_ac• 11 months ago

The second paragraph of the article:

Delulu, tradwife, broligarcy, and lewk, have all been added because experts believe the words will not be just a fad, but will have linguistic staying power.

lucideer• 11 months ago

The fact they've included that paragraph doesn't invalidate the question. Cambridge used to add ~500, maybe as many as 1000 words annually. In recent years it's climbed to 2000 but 6000 is rather unprecedented.

dragonwriter2• 11 months ago

The OED may take a while to add words sometimes, but it doesn't avoid slang; it aims for completeness rather than limiting itself to a particular formal register.

xdfgh1112• 11 months ago

Weird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR

TillE2• 11 months ago

I've definitely heard "delulu" years ago, probably floating around Twitter. There's a Wikipedia article on the word for some reason, and it supports this.

dragonwriter2• 11 months ago

Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reels of capitalising the zeitgeist for PR

Delulu is more than a decade old.

it's a physical dictionary after all

Is the Cambridge Dictionary still physical-first? I know the OED has been digital-first since at least around the turn of the millenium (the last full physical edition was in 1989.)

3836293648• 11 months ago

The OED has been what since when?

How was their website so utterly unusable for so many years then? That's the entire reason I use the Cambridge now

qn9n• 11 months ago

The Oxford English Dictionary is often considered the more authoritative source on the English language, whereas the Cambridge Dictionary focuses more on modern usage.

Steven420• 11 months ago

Dictionaries are no longer a reliable source of information just click bait bs

umeshunni• 11 months ago

Yeah - this makes me very curious about the longevity of previous 'words of the year'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_the_year

DaSHacka2• 11 months ago

The absolute state

Hoe embarrassing

4gotunameagain• 11 months ago

Freudian slip ? xD

DaSHacka2• 11 months ago

Really sussin typo frfr, got inspo by the skibidi broligarchy to lewk at a bussin tradwife

pringk02• 11 months ago

There is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.

StopDisinfo910• 11 months ago

The comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia.

Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them.

Maybe old age really is a shipwreck after all.

immibis• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is a guardian and judge, whether it wants to be or not. Look how quickly politicians changed their policies after Wikipedia stopped bothsidesing the Gaza war. There were endless arguments on talk pages about how it shouldn't be called the "Israel-Hamas war" any more, since it's converted into a genocide of one side only. For more than a year. And then suddenly, once they agreed to change it, within only a couple of months, politicians across the USA and Europe start sanctioning Israel for committing a genocide. The same politicians who all the rest of the time said there was no genocide. Wikipedia is more powerful than it thinks.

deafpolygon• 11 months ago

Ok Cambridge just lost a significant amount of credibility in my eyes.

janmarsal• 11 months ago

they're just competing with the urban dictionary for relevance and rizz

treetalker• 11 months ago

Oof. Cambridge has zero aura.

I'll stick with my physical Compact OED and 1942 Webster's New International, thanks.

h4ch12• 11 months ago

Is this "progress" or are we glorifying moving backwards by including this sort of language just to be "in"?

I really don't know how to feel about this, maybe it's my education making me bigoted, looking down upon what's clearly ephemeral; slang words like these come and go with time, and I think the timeframe for words to be included in the dictionary has greatly reduced.

Almost no one apart from a very small, terminally online subset of people will ever use these words and an even smaller subset will use these in IRL conversation; adding these is a bad idea and doesn't bode well for dictionaries wrt credibility.

They should release a DLC for dictionaries that covers slang like this, not make it part of the official English specification.

s_trumpet• 11 months ago

Dictionaries are not specs for the English language, they are wikis. Twenty years later when “delulu” (a word popular enough that my 65 year old father regularly uses it) has fallen out of style, new readers would find it very useful to get the word defined in the dictionary.

h4ch12• 11 months ago

Fair enough, I've personally looked at dictionaries along with thesauri as a spec rather than a wiki; but your anecdote makes sense.

Piskvorrr• 11 months ago

- terminally online

- DLC

- IRL

As in, "things that happened before my Xth year of life are Normal, nay, Traditional even. Everything afterwards is Ephemeral, and possibly Heresy as well."

Alas! All is ephemeral.

dialup_sounds• 11 months ago

Most English dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Odds are more people use these words than use a dictionary on a regular basis, and including them doesn't diminish the credibility of dictionaries unless you think their purpose is to curb the use of language instead of documenting it. Dictionaries include words labeled obsolete or archaic, informal and slang meanings, and even offensive and disparaging words without "glorifying" their use.

JambalayaJimbo2• 11 months ago

It’s 2025 and everyone is terminally online, this is not a small subset of people. There is also a generation divide here.

rufus_foreman• 11 months ago

Your mission for the week, should you choose to accept it, is to get one (or more) of the "words" tradwife, delulu, or broligarchy used in the acceptance criteria of one of your JIRA stories in progress without it being noticed or commented on in any way.

LorenPechtel• 11 months ago

Some of those I have never heard, which makes me think they're jumping the gun.

But I'm surprised that work wife wasn't already in the dictionary.

more_corn• 11 months ago

I quit

'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary

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