"Klingons," "Jedi knights" and the "Force" have fought their way into the book along with other "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" references like "dilithium," "warp drive, "dark side, "mind-meld" and "Luke Skywalker." " Falun Gong" and the " Taliban" enter for the first time, along with "asymmetrical warfare" for the standoff between great powers and less-equipped ones. There are "wannabe," "aerobicist," "body-piercing," "comb-over," "lipectomy," "body mass index," "orthorexia," "Botox," "Viagra" and "Prozac." Many of the new additions shed light on the decade's obsessions. The new words come from fast-talking areas like global marketing, science fiction, popular literature, films, business and politics. "By tradition a word has to be used five times, in five different places, over five years, but something like 'text messaging' got in sooner because it became so widely used so quickly," said Claire Turner, a spokeswoman for the trade and reference department. The velocity of change has made the dictionary's customary method of certifying new words or usages positively quaint. "With technology and the speed of communication, new words and usages become established much more quickly," said Angus Stevenson, 42, the new edition's co-author. The lexicographers scrolling through their 70 million-word database inside the Oxford University Press' columned campus headquarters have had a breathless decade.
#SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY BITT FULL#
But it is beach reading compared with the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford has been around for a long time, so shorter is a relative concept - the two-volume dictionary is 3,792 pages.
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