Jonathan Dent, OED Senior Assistant Editor, provides a roundup of the new words, phrases, and compounds added to the OED this quarter:
New additions this September cover a lot of ground, stretching alphabetically from abugida (a system for organizing words or characters in the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, or a writing system used in some South or South-East Asian languages) to the slangily dismissive whatevs. This update travels back to the early Jurassic to examine dinosaurs of the genus Anchisaurus, drops in on ancient Rome for the fertility ritual Ambarvalia, and returns to the present day for a phenomenon celebrated (or at least, endlessly photographed) in the archetypal modern Western city: Manhattanhenge is an alignment of sunrise or sunset with the streets of New York, first recorded by this name in an email from the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2003. Among the earliest additions this quarter is an adverbial sense of ange (expressing a feeling of distress or anxiety) found in Old English works copied over a thousand years ago, while the most recent was first used less than seven years ago: a satoshi is the smallest monetary unit in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and is named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the—probably pseudonymous—developer(s) of Bitcoin.
The italicized words have links to their OED entries; he goes on to discuss the categories of food and drink (e.g., angels’ share, “the portion of distilled spirits […] lost to evaporation while ageing in casks”), politics and society (simples: “This modification of the interjection simple is probably unfamiliar to anyone outside the UK”), World English and regional words (sumphy, “a Scottish adjective meaning either ‘stupid’ or ‘sullen’”), and sf (“Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of The Rise of Skywalker in December can pass the time by checking out the linguistic histories of lightsabre, Jedi, Padawan, and the Force”). I was particularly struck by the new entry for chess (pie), “a pie or tart filled with a mixture of eggs, butter, and sugar, to which nuts and fruit are sometimes added”:
Etymology: Origin unknown.
It has been suggested that chess is an alteration of cheese n.1 (compare cheesecake n. and cheese pie n. at cheese n.1 Compounds 2: the former at least denotes a similar dish and did not necessarily contain cheese; compare also chess cake in quot. 1860), but the form chess is not attested as a variant of cheese n.1 Another theory is that the name is an alteration of chest n.1 in chest pie, with reference to storing pies in a chest, but no evidence has been found of a form chest pie (or of pie chest). There is an anecdote in which the pie was described as ‘jes’ pie’ (just pie), which became chess pie, but there is no evidence to support this.
What a tangled recipe for such a simple word!
It seems very strange to me that “abugida” has just now been added to the OED.
Why? It’s not exactly a household word; after the first citation, 1961 University Coll. (Addis Ababa) Rev., it doesn’t occur again till the ’90s. I’m more surprised about arancini, attested since 1950.
anchoïade, n.: A traditional Provençal purée made principally from anchovies, garlic, and olive oil, typically served as a dip or spread on bread.
Sounds like Patum, typically served on hot buttered toast. There are differences (garlic), so I’ll give it a try. Why is it suddenly an English word? We don’t use dots unless we’re the New Yorker, I thought. This is a good one:
simonize, v.1: intransitive. To practise simony; to buy or sell ecclesiastical or spiritual benefits, especially preferment or office in the church.
They’ve already got
polish (a motor vehicle).
“you’ll never know how beautiful you can make your car look until you Simonize it”
Could cause confusion.
“You’ll never know how beautiful you can make your car look until you buy or sell ecclesiastical or spiritual benefits.”
It seems very strange to me that “abugida” has just now been added to the OED.
I agree, but there’s a lot of that sort of narrow jargon; as I repeatedly mentioned here a few years back, pentanummium (a 6th century Byzantine coin denomination) is not there either (or at least it wasn’t back when I still could check).
Still not there, but remember that they can’t include every word that’s ever been used in English.
Peth-winds: still not there.
Tamil, which is an abugida like almost all Indic scripts before very recent times, is also presented in such a table and learned as a syllabary, but not so the other major scripts of India.
The Early Jurassic, because that’s an official name ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
(…but then, only in English. The uppercase is not used in French or Spanish or German or Russian.)
And why is the proper name Anchisaurus in the dictionary at all? Apparently just because one source wrote it in lowercase in 2003.
I’ve often been baffled by where the chess in chess pie (growing up in Mississippi, we always just called the delicacy ‘chess squares’) came from. Thanks for this.
angels’ share
The Devil’s Cut
Also the Devil plays a minor role here. At the Jim Beam Distillery in Kentucky, USA, they claim that they can extract the liquid that is being absorbed by barrel during the maturing process. They do this, by filling the emptied barrel with water, spin it round at very high speeds and then they blend this extracted liquid with a 6-year old Bourbon.
This product is being marketed as Jim Beam Devil’s Cut.
https://chasingthedrammer.com/2018/04/27/the-angels-share-devils-cut/
The Devil’s Cut
They use Scotting & English whisky instead of the Irish & American whiskey.
I wish I could charge a million quid a pint for my dishwater. Still, theirs is probably a better flavour.
Maker’s Mark® uses whisky, though.
Here’s a “chess cake” use earlier than OED’s 1860, and not strengthening OED’s note, “U.S. regional (chiefly southern and south Midland).”
May 31, 1856, Cape Ann Light and Gloucester Telegraph, p. 3, col. 4 [Am. Historical Newsp.]:
“Call at 79 & 80, Front Street, If in want of Confectionary, Sweet-Meats, Cakes….&c
…Lady Fingers, Chess Cakes, Jumbles, Kisses, Maccaronies….”
La part des anges est la partie du volume d’un alcool qui s’évapore pendant son vieillissement en fût.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_des_anges
It’s not surprising that OED2 lacked abugida, which is based on OED1 (finished 1928) + OED Supplement (Vol.1 A to D started 1952, published 1972). OED3 revised alphabetically from M in 2000 to R until 2010, when alphabetical revision was abandoned.
Since then each quarterly batch of aditions seems to include a few groups themed by topic or root plus miscellaneous others. I’m sure they have well-thought-out guidelines for what to prioritise for each lexicographer’s area of expertise. One thing they won’t do is whip up a short placeholder entry for a missing word until they can get round to producing a full-quality entry. So it’s inevitable that there will be many gaps for years to come.
I once saw a Cutty Sark box with “Scots Whiskey” on the sides and “Scots Whisky” on the ends.
The relevant federal regulations giving the formal definitions of what can and can’t be labeled for U.S. sale as a particular sort of booze consistently use the “whisky” spelling. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/5.22 OTOH, some of the federal drug statutes still use the archaic spelling variant “marihuana,” so that’s not a particularly good indicator of actual U.S. usage.
Here’s a “chess cake” use earlier than OED’s 1860, and not strengthening OED’s note, “U.S. regional (chiefly southern and south Midland).”
Nice find — send it to them!
A group called Cannabis Attorneys of Michigan says Both “j” and “h” spellings are equally accurate and acceptable, but if you are conflicted, you can always just use “cannabis.” By just use “cannabis” I know what they mean. It’s like “just say no”. Anyway according to them the H spelling is Mexican and is also used in Canada whereas the J spelling is “uniquely American.” Mexicans & Canadians: “Define ‘uniquely American,’ weed puffers.”
I pronounce “Wales” and “whales” differently, and so ought to pronounce marijuana and marihuana differently. However, I use the former spelling and latter pronunciation, because the -h- spelling is dated and the /hw/ pronunciation would strike one as a precious attempt to sound hispanophone (or a racist insinuation that Latinos are drug smugglers?).
That’s a half-joke; I have /hw/ in e.g. “San Juan” and “Huawei” and don’t worry about precious or racist.
Anyway according to them the H spelling is Mexican
Not only “h”. It’s almost always mariguana in Mexican news sites I have been reading this year, for instance Diario de Juárez. I had never seen this spelling before.
This is stranger than I thought, because an internet search just now with “méxico diario mariguana” showed Spanish-language hits most of which used the marihuana spelling. Here is one with “g” from the Mexican Forbes site: Fumar mariguana a diario aumenta riesgo de psicosis: estudio.
The Los Angeles Public Library maintains a list of hispanophone news sites: Noticias de países hispanohablantes.
And why is the proper name Anchisaurus in the dictionary at all? Apparently just because one source wrote it in lowercase in 2003.
Sure, what’s wrong with it? “What the devil is that?” “Oh, that? That’s the bones of an anchisaurus.” Thuryago, now there are two citations.
Huawei
Properly that ought to be [xw], and I hereby mandate every anglophone with [x] in their accent to say it that way henceforth.
Not that simple. It varies between [h] and [x], or at least did when I was on Taiwan.
In Putonghua it’s officially [x].
😮
Officially and northern; southern (in Mandarin and beyond) it’s [h]. I suspect [kxʰ] (official & northern) and [kʰ] (southern) are distributed the same way.
[ˌhuːaˈvaɪ̯] in German media. 🙁
I’m lowkey trying to learn Spanish, and my listening exercises want me to spell guau when the speaker says “Wow”. (Which they do). I have no idea why huau isn’t good enough (but uau might look too weird).
Anyway, the Real Diccionario says marihuana, también mariguana, but I assume the latter is to be pronounced with [ɣw] and it doesn’t have dates. (The historical dictionaries are only online up to B or C, as far as I can see).
“Hua” versus “gua” may be a relict of battles between schools of orthography, the prize being to establish conventions that represent slightly different productions. I don’t know what sound “ɣw” is, but if it’s a raspy sound at the back, followed by a “wh”, then that’s about right.
Consider how guapo is uttered. The initial sound is not a hard “g” as in “gooey”.
Well, no: the Spanish g isn’t the fricative [ɣ], it’s the mere approximant [ɰ]. (Likewise for b and d, except there the IPA doesn’t have separate symbols for fricatives and approximants.) Combine a velar approximant with a labial approximant (u), and you get the labiovelar approximant [w].
A word that was new to me this year is cajon (originally cajón), a Latin American percussion instrument – a plywood box with a sound hole on the back. The player sits on top and strikes the front and sides. It’s kind of a compact drum kit and it’s been moving from Latin music into American pop.
It varies between [h] and [x]
So does the Spanish.
Although it’s sometimes said that the unvoiced stops in English are aspirated and the voiced stops aren’t, the voiced stops are actually aspirated a little bit. In a Spanish word like guapo, the g is not aspirated at all and a native English speaker has a hard time hearing it, even though the mouth is configured for a g. When they’e taught not to say “g;uapo, Americans tend to say wapo – this is a feature of the American accent in Spanish.
@David, so marihuana should have a triphthong and mariguana a semivowel between i and u? A nice distinction.
Also the theory seems to be that gua/guo do start with a stop (unaspirated, as Bloix explained) after pause and nasals, and the approximant intervocalically. Except in guau, or maybe I can’t hear it because Danish doesn’t have fully voiced stops either — but I do hear it in guapo.
More on “chess cake” by George Goebel (hat tip to Joan Hall of DARE):
https://dare.wisc.edu/words/quarterly-updates/quarterly-update-17/chess-cake/
The “cheesecake/chess pie” dis/connect has an analogy in German: Käsekuchen, which is not made from cheese, but rather quark, sweet (and sour) cream, eggs and lemon juice, and can be freestanding instead of languishing in a pieshell. It contains nowhere near the revolting quantity of sugar that goes into chess pie.
More on “chess cake” by George Goebel
Thanks; here’s the etymology given there (he gives the old alternative spelling chescake):
No triphthong; there’s a syllable boundary through it. The theoretical difference is that g adds a velar articulation while h doesn’t, but that’s hard to hear, and I doubt many native speakers would articulate this difference consistently or at all.
Oh yeah, that’s also more or less why one of the two words spelled wind has a short vowel – it was extracted from windy, windmill and other words where the -nd wasn’t word-final, and then it replaced the regular form.
@dm
From Wiktionary:
—
Wend
from Proto-Germanic *wandijaną (“to turn”), causative of Proto-Germanic *windaną (“to wind”)
Wind
from Proto-Germanic *windaną.
—
Since English wind like German winden has the causative sense, the Wiktionary derivation ignores semantics (because the sound change would be irregular if wind were to be derived from *wandijana?). These verbs seem to have got tangled???? in both German where you have both verwandt and verwendet and English where wend disappeared except as a past of go, but a person can wind up somewhere.
in both German where you have both verwandt and verwendet
Do you mean gewunden (wound around, twisted, meandering), the participle of winden ? Verwandt is “related by blood or marriage”, verwendet is “used (for some purpose)”. All from winden/wenden sez DWDS.
It also says wenden is (historically) the causative form, as does your Wiktionary quote. That is not the case today, as you indeed wrote: “Since English wind like German winden has the causative sense…”
I find all this explanation rather confusing. When one just uses the words as the Good Lord intended, there is no problem.
It’s obvious that this is an ingroup/outgroup thing. Practice gets you in, or it doesn’t. Reams of analysis is no remedy.
Yes, but lots of people – in Germany – use verwandt for this sense, too.
…which brings us to the joys of Rückumlaut (check especially endnote 2).
Also [χ]. In Chinese [χ] might be somewhere in the middle geographically; in Spanish, however, it’s in Spain.
I wonder why ‘Ambarvalia’ has suddenly appeared in the OED? I only know the word from a poem I remember reading when I had a Rupert Brooke craze some 45 years ago (he had apparently supposed it to be a festival of the dead rather than a fertility ritual). https://www.bartleby.com/232/214.html
He rhymes it with “star”!
I wonder why ‘Ambarvalia’ has suddenly appeared in the OED?
Maybe it had something to do with the most recent citation:
(The previous one is from 1903, so it may not have been noticed for quite a while.)
Peth-winds: still not there.
Huh? It’s been there since the First Edition. Under P: “Pethwind, variant of bethwine.” And under B, complete with Water-Babies quote, untouched since 1887 except for minor reformatting:
The OED1 and OED2 burned up a nontrivial amount of print space on listing alternate and obsolete spellings among the headwords, such as adæquate: “obs. variant of adequate”, or scopeboard: “obs. (perverted) var. of scupper”. Those are no longer in the alphabetical list of headwords, but if you type them into the Quick Search box, it will take you to the entry where they’re listed among the spellings.
Bethwine is in the English Dialect Dictionary as well:
Incidentally, the context of the Water-Babies quote is peevologically amusing:
It probably comes from shortening Turpethwind, the German name for Operculina turpethum ‘turpeth/turbith’ < Latin < Arabic < Persian < Sanskrit tripuṭā~tripuṭa.
@Y
In Irish quite a few wildflower names have as second element uan “foam”. The corresponding Welsh word is ewyn. For Turpethwind, do you know of other medicinal garden names that have been nativised and applied to other native (or escaped garden) wildflowers?
The only German name I can find on the first page of Google results in German (!) is Turpithtrichterwinde, with -winde (f.) for various climbing flowers. (Trichter “funnel” must describe the shape of the blossoms.)
Wiesenschaumkraut!
@ Stu Clayton. “Consider how guapo is uttered. The initial sound is not a hard “g” as in “gooey”.
The phonetic realization of Spanish /b/, /d/, and /g/ depends on the position of the phoneme in the utterance. To give just two of the rules (based on description, not prescription):
1. Utterance-initially, they are realized as stops: [b], [d], [g] (non-technically known as “hard b,” “hard d,” and “hard g”), as in
¡Buenos días!
¡Dámelo!
¡Guárdelos!
2. Intervocalically, they are realized as approximants (I don’t know the non-technical synonym of approximant):
la boliviana
la danesa
la guatemalteca
DM: Sorry, I was too lazy to include sources. Turpethwind comes up in older books, e.g. here.
It’s unusual to find German loanwords in 17th century English, and it’s unusual to form English words by this kind of aphaeresis, but the formal and semantic match is too good to deny.
DLG: And yet, the California Indian ethnonym Wappo supposedly comes from Spanish guapo.
Yes, DLG is too dogmatic. I have definitely heard initial g- pronounced less “hard” than his rule would suggest.
My earlier comment in this thread was in response to “Consider how guapo is uttered. The initial sound is not a hard “g” as in “gooey”.
I should have restricted the comment to guapo.
Since Spanish voiced stops have more than one realization and those realizations are based not on etymology but on phonological environments, the latter have to be specified:
In utterance-initial position (as in ¡Guapo, ven acá!), only the stop occurs.
After a vowel (as in este guapo), only the approximant occurs.
After a consonant except /l/ (as in un guapo), only the stop occurs.
After /l/ there is free variation at least before full vowels (algo, alguno) and at least before the semivowel [j] (alguien).
After /l/ and before the semivowel [w], /g/ is realized at least as a stop. If there is good evidence for its realization as an approximant (as in el guapo), it would be good to have it.
**
Precisely to what part or parts of my earlier comment does “Too dogmatic” refer?
**
“I have definitely heard initial g- pronounced less “hard” than his rule would suggest.”
“initial g-” is too broad (see above on utterance-initial versus word-initial realizations).
If by “less ‘hard’” is meant an approximant, the earlier comment notes that possibility (“Intervocalically, they are realized as approximants: [as in] la guatemalteca”) and the present one notes more.
If still more are to be added, let us have them.
**
“DLG: And yet, the California Indian ethnonym Wappo supposedly comes from Spanish guapo.
I believe that etymology to be right (guapo here appears to mean ‘brave, valient’, which is one of the recorded senses of that Spanish word). If it is, guapo was heard with an approximant.
“And yet…” implies that the [w] of Wappo speaks against something I have said. What precisely does it speak against?
The sentence “If it is, guapo was heard with an approximant” in the foregoing comment would be clearer if it read:
If it is, the [w] of Wappo tells us that guapo was heard with the approximant because guapo with [g] would have yielded an English reflex with [g] rather than [w].
Right, but you wrote, “Utterance-initially, they are realized as stops.”
“Right, but you wrote, “Utterance-initially, they are realized as stops.”
**
When you say “right,” with which of my statements are you agreeing?
Do you disagree with the statement that “Utterance-initially, they are realized as stops”?
What is the implication of “but”? Does the word mean that you see a contradiction between two or more of my statements or a contradiction between a statement of mine and reality?
When my wife started using English every day after coming from Chile 40 years ago she tended to use [g] for initial w in some English words. For example, she pronounced “woman” as [‘gumən]. It depended what vowel followed the w: I don’t think she had a [g] in “when”.
@a. C-B
I think this is a speech habit based on correspondences like Guillermo = William. Does she use less of a g sound when saying “even when”?
It may be relevant that diphthongs in Spanish, by fiat of the RAE but I assume it has some relation to the actual spoken language, are always high glide, low nucleus. So /we/ fits right in, but /wu/ does not. (You can have high-high like in pengüino, but the RAE defines that as two syllables).
Taboos on the sequences [ji wu] are very common worldwide, those on [je wo] not much less so.
@ Lars. The Spanish word is pingüino, universally pronounced in three syllables: [pĩŋˈɡwi.no]. So far as I know, Spanish does not have *pengüino.
When you say that “the RAE defines that as two syllables,” does the word “that” refer to the entire word or just to the sounds represented by the letters üi?
If to the latter (those two letters), there is no pronunciation of the word in four syllables, that is, *pĩŋˈ- ɡu – i – no does not occur (except, potentially, in poetry if the poet needs one more syllable for metrical purposes), and therefore the Royal Spanish Academy has no reason to decree this way or that.
It would be good to see the published source in which the Academy says what you believe it does.
Possibly, you have in mind words such as construir and instruir, which are universally pronounced in three syllables (cons – tru – ir, ins -tru -ir), never in two (*cons – trwir, *in – flwir).
There too, the Academy has no reason to decree this way or that because those are universal pronunciations, of which it approves.
On reflection, I tend to think that you have mistaken the purpose of the dieresis in that word.
Its purpose is not to show that /u/ constitutes a separate syllable but to show that the is not a silent letter (as it would be if it were omitted; that is, if one wrote *pinguino, that spelling would represent only the pronunciation *[pĩŋˈɡi.no], which does not occur at all).
In the second line of the last paragraph above, read “show that the u is not….”
@ Athel. “When my wife started using English every day after coming from Chile 40 years ago she tended to use [g] for initial w in some English word.”
She was carrying over into English the realization by certain hispanophones of Spanish /ue/ as, depending on the position of that sequence in the utterance, [gwe] or [ɣ̞we], as in Spanish hueso ‘bone’ /ueso/ realized, depending on the position of the word in the utterance, either as [gweβ̞o] or [ɣ̞weβ̞o].
Dept. of flyspecks: if you want to keep the dot over the i under another diacritic, the official procedure is to place a combining dot above the i (and the two dots should merge to one,) and then the diacritic. Unfortunately most older fonts are not compliant. In this case, i̇̃ may show one dot (right) or two (wrong), depending on your font. ĩ will show no dot.
Why 26 Korean words have been added to Oxford English Dictionary
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-58749976
Daebak! The OED gets a K-update
https://public.oed.com/blog/daebak-a-k-update/
That’s great — I hardly knew any of those words. (Cue restrictivists insisting that if they don’t personally know the words they can’t possibly be English…)
I wonder if soju has already made it into the OED.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soju
P.S.: It has: In 2016, the word was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.
Yup.
First citation:
He rhymes it with “star”!
For such a rare word I would not expect a fully anglicized pronunciation “am-ber-VAY-li-ay.” Star would be a fine non-rhotic rhyme for “am-ber-VAY/VAH-lee-ah/uh”.
“Fine”? Barely acceptable, I’d say. But YMMV.
@DLG — pingüino, of course, the e was a contamination from Danish and English. And I do realize how it would be pronounced without the diaeresis, I should have picked an example without that complication.
But I misremembered what the RAE says — on the other hand: All sequences of two different closed vowels are supposed to be diphthongs without exception, at least for accentuation purposes while it is two identical closed vowels that always make hiatus. It doesn’t touch on construir but under that headword it remarks that construido does not take a tilde — which is consistent with both a diphthong and a hiatus, as I understand those rules, as long as the i takes the stress.
(Then there is the whole thing about the latest orthography allowing vió only for people who still use a two syllable pronunciation, implying that one-syllable [βi̯o] is more common now [and as a monosyllable can’t have a tilde]. Are you really sure nobody has a diphthong in construir? I talk to both a Spanish and a Mexican speaker on a daily basis at work, I can ask. The Mexican has a degree in linguistics, even).
@LM: I don’t have a diphthong in construir, but I sometimes have one in construí, and always in cuida or jesuítico. Nonetheless, I think the orthographic rule is to pretend there’s always a hiatus, regardless of people’s actual pronunciation.
Towards the end of each year, Dansk Sprognævn (the Danish Language Council) and P1 radio station select Denmark’s word of the year. Inevitably capturing the (sometimes unflattering) mood of the times, previous winners have included klimatosse (“climate idiot”) in 2019 and hvidvask (“money laundering”) in 2018.
An early contender for 2020’s title is surely samfundssind, which the Danish Language Council defines as “putting the concern of society higher than one’s own interests”. More loosely translated as “community spirit” or “social mindedness”, samfundssind has become the buzzword of the coronavirus crisis: by searching a database of Danish news, the language council found that usage of “samfundssind” increased from just 23 times in February to 2,855 in March.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20201018-samfundssind-the-single-word-that-connects-denmark
That is actually a pretty good description of how it feels to be a Dane in Denmark, the journalist not succumbing to the lure of the twee (which is also abundantly to be found). Then of course everything closed down again in December, that article is from last autumn when it looked like the virus was fading, and solidarity didn’t hold up quite as well when people got tired of face masks — but still fairly well.
There were always virus deniers who insisted that it was all a plot of some kind, but a much smaller minority than in other countries where they were in the news. And all mixed up with alt-right and xenophobia and general rabble-rousing, of course. The biggest hub-hub was a Facebook storm against a couple of pubs who excluded people with undocumented “exemptions”. (You could actually get official badges saying “EXEMPT” but as per trust-based operations you didn’t have to show any documentation to get one — also because nobody wanted to waste time on creating official rules for what would entitle you to one — and thus wearing one didn’t actually exempt you from any restrictions if the shop owner or bus driver didn’t want to let you in without a letter from your doctor. They might as well have said “CRACKPOT” or “ENTITLED ASSHOLE” and I don’t think I saw more than one or two in the 18 months of restrictions).