Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary that traces its roots to a time before looksmaxxing and yacht rock, has added those words along with chili crisp, shapewear and cuffing season, to its comprehensive accounting of the English language.
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The company, based in Springfield, Massachusetts, announced Tuesday that it had added those five terms and 1,395 other new definitions to its online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com. Many will also be added to upcoming editions of the print dictionary.
Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary publisher in America. It traces its start to 1843, when brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary. The company emphasizes that the dictionary is not a static catalog, but a reflection of the many different ways words are used by real people.
That includes food-related words that have become more commonly used in the United States like superfood, “a food (such as salmon, broccoli or blueberries) that is rich in nutrients,” and shishito, “a slender usually mild chili pepper of East Asia.” On the sweeter side, the dictionary added cake pop, “a compressed ball of cake crumbs and icing that is dipped in a usually chocolate or sugary coating,” for the uninitiated.
Anyone who dreads going to work or school might be familiar with the Sunday scaries, the “feelings of anxiety or sadness that arise on Sunday from the knowledge that the weekend is almost over.” And people who know Braden Peters, the proudly vain social media influencer known as Clavicular, might be familiar, for better or worse, with looksmaxxing. Merriam-Webster calls it “the practice of taking one or more sometimes extreme or dangerous measures intended to increase one’s physical attractiveness.”
Gregory Barlow, the president of Merriam-Webster, who declined to provide a complete list of the 1,400 new definitions added to the dictionary, said that the company did not remove any words in its latest update.
“There wasn’t a theme, but we can see that online culture and social media increasingly generate new language,” he said in an email. “Conversation on social platforms creates fertile soil in which new words crop up and spread.”
The process for keeping the dictionary up-to-date, or giving it a glow-up, which is one of the new terms just added, starts with editors who read widely and identify promising new entries for the dictionary. The editors then search through databases of articles, books and speeches, to see if those words have been used widely and have meanings that are broadly understood.
Proposed additions are reviewed by more senior colleagues, “but there’s no committee, no advocacy, no meetings for new word inclusion,” the company says on its website. Ultimately, it says, a word gets into the dictionary “when it is used by many people who all agree that it means the same thing.”
Merriam-Webster typically adds about 1,000 entries to the dictionary annually.
Fans of Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald might be pleased to see that yacht rock made the cut. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a style of soft rock music originating in the 1970s and 1980s.”
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Also clearing the bar was cuffing season, “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with.”
Merriam-Webster also added parasocial, “a one-sided emotional connection with someone (especially a celebrity or fictional character) whom one does not know personally,” and Rickroll, “to trick (someone) into hearing the song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by English singer Rick Astley.”
“Words like cuffing season and looksmaxxing are widely used now, and people want to know what they mean, so we’re serving our audience by defining them,” Barlow said. “The online dictionary has limitless space to add all the words that merit inclusion, even if some words turn out to be relatively ephemeral.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.