Coming up on Word Matters, the dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com recently got a bit bigger.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Lexicography isn't, of course,
all about recording podcasts and researching interesting and controversial uses of words.
There's also the part about writing definitions.
In fact,
several hundred new words and meanings were recently added to the mariamwebster.com dictionary.
In this episode, we're going to tell you about some of them.
One of the great things about having the dictionary online is that the recent work on the dictionary gets to be seen more quickly.
And the definitions that are added are definitions that we can announce.
And we recently had a release of new words, 455 new words and definitions.
And we'd like to talk about some of those new entries.
Do you have a favorite?
Well, there's no question that the favorite, the darling of this batch is the word fluffernutter.
And everybody loves that word, and I do too.
It's a fun word to say, and I just looked in our citation files at the history of that word,
and we have evidence in the files of it going back to before 1980.