Merriam-Webster recently made 690 additions to its dictionary, and honestly, we’re still processing them.
Some newly legitimized words are long overdue:
- Common abbreviations like NGL (“not gonna lie”) and TTYL (“talk to you later”) made the list.
- Also paying their dues in the cultural zeitgeist and meriting inclusion: jorts (denim shorts), tiny house (a home smaller than 500 square feet), and chef’s kiss (a gesture of approval).
Some words, though, just feel like Merriam-Webster is now a living Steve Buscemi meme:
- Lookin’ at you, modern slang like rizz (romantic appeal) and simp (to show excessive devotion).
But hey, that’s the dictionary nerds’ lane…
… whereas ours is business and tech, so we’ll stick there and run down the reference tome’s newest entries within our nerdom:
Generative AI (noun): artificial intelligence capable of generating new content (such as images or text) in response to a prompt.
- Used in a sentence: “No way, that wasn’t a picture of me wearing jorts… That was, uh, totally some generative AI program.”
Smishing (noun): the practice of texting someone in order to trick them into revealing confidential information which can then be used for criminal purposes.
- Used in a sentence: “Detective, I’m worried the person behind this smishing scheme will release all those photos of me wearing jorts.”
’Grammable (adjective): suitable to be posted on Instagram.
- Used in a sentence: “I hate how khaki shorts make me look, so that picture’s absolutely not ‘grammable.”
Edgelord (noun): someone who makes exaggerated statements online with the intent of shocking others.
- Used in a sentence: “Elon Musk is an edgelord.”
Finsta (noun): a secret or incognito Instagram account.
- Used in a sentence: “I was forced to use my finsta after I called Elon an edgelord and his fanboys came after me.”
Meme stock (noun): a stock that experiences a temporary surge in popularity and price due to a coordinated effort by small investors.
- Used in a sentence: “People on Reddit disagree, but I think Levi’s should become a meme stock on the strength of their denim shorts catalog alone.”
P.S. There were plenty more business and tech-related inclusions — e.g., “large language model,” “passkey,” “quiet quit,” “girlboss,” and “microtransaction” — but they were just too hard to work into sentences featuring jorts.
