Merriam-Webster has added 250 new words to their online dictionary. Their selections say a lot about the times we live in. Cultural trends are represented with terms such as "sriracha" and "froyo" for food and "troll" and "ransomware" for tech. Politics made it into the dictionary -not the word itself, which has been there for a while, but new terms like "alt-right" and old terms terms like "dog whistle," which has been used for decades, but is now understood more widely.
And sometimes a biological term develops a second life as something analogous and less specific, as we see in the case of hive mind; what began as a way to talk about the coordinated ways that colonies of social insects like bees and ants behave has come to be applied also to the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people seeming to function as a single mind.
Read more about the new words at Merriam-Webster. -via The A.V. Club
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