Retronyms are newly coined words that remake or replace a pre-existing term in order to make room for innovations. For example, what has always been called “mail” (i.e. what comes in stamped envelopes to a street or postbox address), is ...

On first encounter, telegamy one might think it refers to TV gaming. But put alongside its nearest relatives in English (monogamy, bigamy, polygamy) its meaning begins to emerge – as a particular kind ofmarriage, albeit not one made in a ...

While we might recognise the verbal elements that make up the recently coined word holistorexia its meaning is not immediately obvious. It’s a combination of holist(ic), as in holistic medicine, and (an)orexia which literally means “lack of desire or appetite”. ...

Amid concerns about other people’s mental health, this four-letter initialism/acronym for “Are you OK?” came alive in 2021. It was coined some years before by an Australian non-profit suicide prevention organisation (in 2009) which holds an annual R U OK? ...

At first sight this could be a slogan for crunchier fish and chips from the deep freeze, something which food companies could definitely improve on. In fact, it’s a highly sophisticated technique for editing the genes of plants, animals and ...

Words and phrases are quite often borrowed from other languages to express a concept for which there is no existing term – think of schadenfreude or déjà vu in English (from German and French respectively). Less frequently, a completely new ...

The - cide suffix provides us with homicide, the most general word for killing another person, as well as specific types of killing that identify the person killed: fratricide (one’s brother or sister), patricide (one’s father), regicide (the king), suicide ...

The ever-increasing use of technology to monitor our daily activities – from CCTV cameras on every street to social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok acquiring user data for marketing (or more sinister) purposes – has bred in us ...

Just what does a proctor do? Essentially his role has always been to manage the affairs of others, as their agent or proxy. But over the centuries the proctor’s responsibilities have varied with the institution he was appointed to. In ...

Browsing through the Cambridge Dictionary’s new words blog, as you do, it’s noticeable how many new compounds are being formed with the word zombie as the first element. Some of these refer to that horror movie staple’s habit of returning ...