The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has published a blog post about some of the words added or updated in December 2020. As always, it's fascinating to see what gets the imprimatur of inclusion in the OED.
New words include lob boll, structural racism, and adulting. There are many others that have been updated because of changes in or additions to their meaning, including traffic, follow, and zhuzh (yes, thank The Crown for that one).
Welcome to this December update to the Oxford English Dictionary. After the unprecedented year documented in the Oxford Languages coronavirus updates and Words of the Year, we end 2020 with a more traditional OED quarterly release, which includes over 500 newly researched and edited entries and senses, alongside a similar number of fully revised and updated entries, drawn from across the history of English and its global varieties.
Among the oldest additions in this update is a sense of the verb follow, meaning specifically to pursue a person covertly, with the aim of watching what they are doing or keeping track of their movements; it was first recorded in the Old English West Saxon version of Luke’s Gospel in the early eleventh century, but managed to give the compilers of earlier editions of OED the slip. At the other end of the chronological spectrum is deliverology, apparently coined by British civil servants as a humorous, spuriously scientific sounding name for the process of successfully (or unsuccessfully) implementing policy and achieving goals in government. First recorded in 2007 in a book by former government adviser Sir Michael Barber (who describes it as a ‘terrible word’), it’s since gone on to be adopted in political contexts outside the UK.
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