"ON your way into work today you may have been stopped by a chugger." "It is possible you made several calls on your handy and passed many greige buildings and girls wearing pelmets."
Confused? These are some of the new words and phrases appearing in the revised second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the press's biggest single-volume dictionary of current English. The new edition was published in August.
A "chugger" stands for charity mugger — a person who approaches passersbyes asking for donations to a charity. A "handy" is a mobile phone and "greige" is the colour between grey and beige. "Pelmet" is slang for a very short skirt.
Many of the new words are simply formed by mixing two others together, such as in "chugger" and "labradoodle" (a cross between a Labrador retriever and a poodle).
"To suit the pace of our lifestyle today there is a growing tendency to mix words together to make entirely new ones called blends," the dictionary researchers said.
They also said there are now 350 expressions to insult someone, but only 40 compliments. Insults include old-fashioned favourites such as "clot" or "chump" and the more modern "muppet" "fribble" and "gink".
There are 50 ways to describe attractive women, including "eye candy" and "cutie", but only 20 ways of describing good-looking men.
The dictionary also added some technology-inspired terms such as "podcast" "phishing" and "wiki".
A "podcast" is the increasingly popular form of audio broadcast downloaded to digital audio players. "Phishing" is the practice of sending fraudulent emails to seek personal or financial details, and a "wiki" is a website or online database developed by a community of users.
Judy Pearsall, Oxford University Press's publishing manager for English dictionaries, said: "These days it's possible to collect large amounts of data, especially if you use the Internet. What's harder is to build a broad and balanced picture of the language as a whole — and that's what Oxford's unique language programme gives us."
Oxford dictionaries draw on the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme: the largest language research programme in the world. The databases contain hundreds of millions of English words and include extracts from the works of writers such as Alexander McCall Smith and Jacqueline Wilson.
With the nearly 130 additions, the massive dictionary now includes about 355,000 words and phrases used in the English-speaking world.
The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in full in 1928, almost 50 years after its editor made a public appeal for English-speaking people worldwide to mail in examples of how English words have been used over the centuries.
