This article was published on May 19, 2014

Vote on Twitter for the next word to make it into the Collins Dictionary, you adorkable duckface


Vote on Twitter for the next word to make it into the Collins Dictionary, you adorkable duckface

Yep, that’s right, Collins is calling for your votes via Twitter to see which word should make it into the twelfth edition of its dictionary, or as it called it, the Twictionary.

Among the options are words like ‘adorkable’ (“dorky in an adorable way”), ‘felfie’ (a farmer selfie), ‘duckface’ (the traditional pouting often seen in selfies) and ‘fatberg‘, which is used to describe “a large mass of solid waste, grease, etc clogging a sewage system”. Eww.

Also on the list are ‘fracktivist’ (someone who protests against fracking), gaybourhood (a gay-friendly neighbourhood), and ‘vaguebooking’, which means to post deliberately vague social media updates in the hope of eliciting a response. Not that you’d do that, of course.

Votes are being accepted until May 28, and the winner will be announced in June. The resulting entry should appear in the next edition of the dictionary, due in around October.

Collins is by no means the only dictionary adding some new technology-driven terms to its pages – the Oxford University Press has already added terms like ‘derp’ and ‘selfie’ and ‘tl;dr’ to its Oxford Dictionaries Online edition.

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The more reserved and entirely separate Oxford English Dictionary has already added words like Tweet, big data and crowdsourcing to the historical record.

However, this is the first time that we’ve seen a call for votes via Twitter to decide exactly which words from the modern lexicon should make it into the dictionary.

➤ Twictionary [Collins Dictionary]

Featured Image Credit – Shutterstock

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