Words keep coming and they don’t stop coming

Baby bump and Swiftie are in the dictionary, right? Um, not quite. Soon, but not yet.

English evolves at warp speed now, boosted by social media’s endless prose, seeing an archive like Collins barely finding time to add half-sibling or double-space, blastproof and compostable, only for newbies like warp speed and newbie to come knocking.

Dictionary sites are overflowing with limbo words hoping to join the official lexicon.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

Content creator is now a career, yet only recently made the database. Ditto for terabit (1000 gigabits) and dishwashing. Mid-strength and safe word, beach read and survivor guilt. The siege is relentless, as timezone (one word) and evote (no hyphen) clamour for inclusion.

Hence my habit of loitering vestibules, those annexes linked to lexicons listing which words float in limbo, language midway between user-usage and publisher patronage. Some seem obvious, like old soul and outsiderism, slushie or reclick. Others like crickets (for a joke’s silent response) or a dog’s cone of shame are slang awaiting sanction. While another set is straight-out odd, like helixophile (a corkscrew collector) or hatfishing (wearing a hat in your Tinder pic.)

Fusions reign, as usual. My fave is binfluencer, that neighbour who puts out their bins early, swaying everyone else’s colour-coded array. Then there’s sporror, a subgenre of horror writing centred around fungi, which feels too close to home. Meanwhile, exervious (a blend of excited and nervous) and todorrow (today-tomorrow) won’t happen.

Headlines can often summon new phrases, such as planet parade, Gulf of America and TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. Sport can likewise keep the annex busy, the webpage receiving pine-time (minutes on the bench), scorpion kick, spoon bowl (battle for last place) and breadstick. Different from a bagel, where a player loses 0-6, a breadstick sees you go down 1-6. And yes, it can be used as a verb.

Sport and politics also mingle, notably in two more nominees. Gordie Howe, a Canadian great of ice-hockey, popularised “Elbows out!” , shorthand for play hard. Since Trump’s tariff splurge, the phrase has been a Canadian catchcry. Just as flood the zone – to overwhelm one part of the field with players – is now a civic ploy, where media are deliberately engulfed in so many new policies that none gain proper scrutiny.

One Collins visitor adores Australian birds, insisting firetail and bronzewing find a nest. AlloyMiner, another contributor, digs South African words, from skabenga (hooligan) to moggy (irrational), zol (marijuana) and seshweshwe (printed cotton). The latter batch has enjoyed success too, as all four words were later enshrined in Oxford’s March intake.

Plot armour is my other fave, the figurative Kevlar a hero wears owing to their story-value. Then again, feel free to suggest your own at Collins’ submissions site or most other dictionary sites online.

I’ll be doing that with a recent word contrived on BlueSky. I ran the contest last month, seeking a label for those three dancing dots you see when a fellow texter is composing their response. Most sources, from Macquarie to Wikipedia, identify the symbol as an ellipsis, yet that feels more academic than dynamic. Ellipses belong in Jane Austen; I wanted a neologism to capture the text context.

Suggestions came in waves, from Apple pips to comp-Os, from stypings to points of author, pretexts to spoke-a-dots. Ransacking German, one bilingual wit converted “wait points” into Wartenpunkte. Though Dave Hooper wooed the jury with textpectation. Surely a candidate for any dictionary’s waiting room, if not a future induction.

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