New words enter the English language every day, and dictionary publishers are constantly struggling to keep up. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary Online (http://www.oed.com/) update the internet version of their 20-volume lexicon every three months. This week 'chill pill,' 'argh,' 'bikini wax,' and 'problemo' are among the almost 2,700 new words that were added to the OED.


"The revised range of the OED contains 2,693 entries, bringing the total number of main entries to 260,154," notes John Simpson, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford English Dictionary. "They are illustrated by 2,827,811 quotations and represent 697,324 different meanings."


Some of the other new and revised entries to the OED include:

Brooklynite
sleeper cell
glitch
high-maintenance
low-maintenance
prime directive
Islamofascism
scratch and sniff
focus group
prissy
primal scream
that's not my problem
comeback kid
Hollywood ending


"The English language changes and evolves all the time and the Oxford English Dictionary has to keep up," according to the OED's Editor at Large, Jesse Sheidlower. "Our editors are currently going through the entire alphabet bit by bit, writing new entries and revising existing ones in order to stay current. It's a massive job and will take years, if not decades, to complete- at which point we'll start over again."


A complete list of the new words and their definitions in the OED is available online at http://www.oed.com/help/updates/prima-proteose.html.