Dictionary adds 'rage farming', 'pinkwashing' and 'Latine' to its list of terms

Dictionary.com has added 313 new words, revised 1,140 definitions and created 130 new definitions as part of its biannual update.

New terms include 'pinkwashing' and 'queerbaiting' which allegedly describe cynical and disingenuous attempts by institutions and corporations to appease the LGBTQ+ community by championing its causes.

Another, 'latine', is presented as being a replacement for controversial term 'latinx', which was found to be offensive to Hispanic people.

Simultaneously, 'folx' was proposed as a non-gendered version of a word that was already non-gendered, folk.

Although the company has not released a full list of the changes that make up its 'Winter 2023' update, on Tuesday it published a list detailing around 100 of them.

Dictionary.com CEO Dara Sanderson said last year that her team is 'documenting how language is changing, following the data and cultural roadmaps'

Dictionary.com added 313 new words, revised 1,140 definitions and created 130 new definitions entirely as part of its biannual update

In addition to the politically charged new words, the dictionary did make some more innocuous changes, adding words for different types of bread and terms used in computer gaming. 

Dictionary.com also announced that it would revise the spelling of 'anti-Semite' to 'antisemite'.

'Our decision to use the closed (no hyphen) and fully lowercase spelling antisemitism for the primary headword reflects the fact that this is now the widely preferred form,' it said.

Nonetheless, in a separate post the website and online dictionary suggested that it makes changes not based on preference, but use.

'We add words to the dictionary because they're real - because they're really used by real people in the real world,' it wrote in a post last year. 

This year it added an extra definition to 'woke', suggesting the word could be used as a means to belittle or put down, and added the tag 'disparaging' before giving the definition.

'Every day at Dictionary.com, our team is documenting how language is changing, following the data and cultural roadmaps,' said CEO Dara Sanderson in a press release in December.

'Our work culminates in an important selection, a word that defines a year and tells a deeper story,' she added.

New word 'folx' is proposed as a non-gendered alternative to 'folk'

'Latine' is added as an alternative to 'latinx' but appears to serve the same function

This term is said to describe cynical marketing strategies designed to insincerely appease the LGBTQ+ community

Although it is similar to 'queerbaiting', this term appears to be more political in nature but again describes a situation in which allegiance to the LGBTQ+ community is insincere

The definition of woke has been updated to suggest that it is 'disparaging' and intended to belittle

Another new word included in the online dictionary was 'self-coup', which is also sometimes known as an 'autocoup'.

Unlike many of the other new words, this term has a much longer history of use, and describes when an elected or legitimate government seeks to illegitimately extend its authority.

Although the word is old, its inclusion may have been prompted by the 2021 Capitol riot, or the attack by right-wing Bolsonaro supporters on the Brazilian Congress in January after the former president's election defeat.

Specifically, the Dictionary.com definition added this year states that a self-coup can occur if a leader declares 'that an election won by an opponent is illegitimate'.

Unlike many of the other words added to the list, this word 'self-coup' has a longer history but has also been updated to make it more relevant to rejecting election results

'Trauma dumping' is a term that describes when somebody is trying to speak about their trauma but the other person does not particularly want to hear it, at least at that point in time

'Abrosexual' describes a person with a changing sexual orientation

An internet term that again describes a ploy, this time to elicit rage in political opponents in order to boost the exposure of a post

The term 'trauma dumping' has been added to the online dictionary, and it said to describe a situation in which somebody shares personal or traumatic experience but the person on the receiving does not want to hear about it or is 'unprepared' for the interaction. 

The term has been criticized before for imposing limits on how people should be able to talk about the hardest aspects of their lives.

Another term 'abrosexual' has been added to the dictionary and pertains to a sexual preference that changes over time.

Another modern term, 'rage farming', born out of the internet, was said to describe the act of provoking political opponents into having a debate on social media in order to boost popularity and engagement with the original post.