A note on this piece: Journalists occasionally ask me to comment on language-related stories. What I send them is usually much longer than what could – or should! – fit into the final article: background, examples, possible directions, and thoughts they can draw from as useful. This is an edited and expanded version of the notes I originally sent to HuffPost for their story about Merriam-Webster’s 2026 dictionary additions. Some points appeared in the published story; others have been clarified, updated, or added here.
That is… a lot of words
The first thing anyone would notice is simply the size of the update: 1,400 new words anddefinitions. For comparison, Merriam-Webster’s September 2023 update contained 690. There is one important caveat: in 2025 Merriam-Webster added more than 5,000 words to the new 12th edition of its Collegiate Dictionary, but that was a different beast – the first comprehensive revision of the print Collegiate in 22 years. So the numbers are not directly comparable.
Still, the scale and speed of contemporary lexical circulation are fascinating. We live in what sociolinguists call conditions of superdiversity. Blommaert and Backus (2013) describe superdiverse modern linguistic repertoires as being assembled through enormously varied trajectories: formal learning, social networks, mobility, technologies, popular culture, and even very brief encounters with particular ways of speaking. Digital life intensifies those possibilities. We can find incredibly niche communities built around incredibly niche interests, and linguistic resources that might once have stayed within one small network can now move between communities, platforms, countries, and generations with remarkable speed.
That does not necessarily mean that we simply accumulate more and more words forever. I’d actually love to see the reverse statistics: which words admitted to dictionaries over the past five or ten years have already retreated back into niche use, or simply begun to sound dated? All praise to the lexicographers who keep track of this, but dictionary inclusion does not mean that a word will remain equally active forever. Our vocabulary is constantly being reshuffled as our interests, technologies, identities, and experiences change.
Slang may be the fastest fashion of all. Even those of us who don’t consider keeping up with trendy vocabulary a professional obligation have noticed that we don’t yeet quite as much anymore, and apparently even slay is approaching retirement. Gen Alpha seems particularly efficient at making everything their parents finally learned unusable again.
And this is why dictionary admission shouldn’t be confused with a word’s birth. Merriam-Webster waits for evidence that an expression has achieved sustained and widespread use. Dictionary admission is therefore less a birth certificate than a graduation ceremony: congratulations, looksmaxxing, you’ve made it.
New words, very old machinery
What I particularly like about the list is that it showcases all the familiar machinery English has always used to build vocabulary. We have compounds like meme coin and cuffing season; blends like promposal; initialisms like FAFO and AGI; and productive morphological patterns such as -maxxing. None of these processes is particularly new. What changes are the cultural experiences we need words for.
Productive patterns are especially fun because once speakers recognize the machinery, they can insert almost anything into it. Looksmaxxing does not need to remain about looks: once -maxxing becomes recognizable as a linguistic resource, speakers can use it to build new forms around whatever they happen to be optimizing. We are looking at you, lethalitymaxxing Pentagon. The same is true of constructions involving -pilled – a fascinating example of how one small piece of language can become detached from its original context and turn into a reusable template.
Recommendation: check Adam Aleksic on how -pilled traveled from The Matrix into contemporary internet language, and what algospeak is all about in this TED talk.
And apparently middle schoolers are currently giving us another version of this. Not in the dictionary, but circulating among younger speakers right now, is Verity – not the Colleen Hoover book/movie, but the Minecraft horror story. From there, -ity seems to have become available for linguistic play of its own: lovity for something you love, hungrity for being hungry, and so on. This Instagram example gives a taste of what is happening.
That is exactly the kind of linguistic creativity I love: speakers recognize a familiar form and manipulate it to create something new. Many contemporary word-formation trends offer a ready-made template that signals an internet-aware style while allowing almost infinite customization – a shared linguistic pattern adapted to highly personal experiences.
There may be a broader cultural parallel here. Twenge, Campbell, and Gentile (2012) examined millions of American English books and found increasing use between 1960 and 2008 of words and phrases associated with individuality, selfhood, uniqueness, and personalization; related work found a rise in singular pronouns such as “I” and “me” alongside a decline in “we” and “us” (Twenge et al., 2013). A much larger historical analysis by Scheffer et al. (2021), covering language in books from 1850 to 2019, similarly identified a striking shift beginning around 1980 toward more individualistic language and more subjective, intuitive ways of talking about the world. None of this means that contemporary slang is simply a product of growing individualism, but it provides an interesting cultural backdrop: we have increasingly fine-grained linguistic resources for talking about our particular identities, feelings, experiences, and ways of seeing the world.
There is a wonderful Estonian word, äratundmisrõõm: roughly, the joy of recognition. That little moment of YES, THAT IS EXACTLY IT. It is part of why people delight in recognizing themselves in a meme, why Swifties can hear a lyric and feel that somebody has somehow put their own experience into words, and why we are so pleased when somebody finally names an extremely specific feeling we thought was ours alone.
Being able to put into words who we are and how we feel is part of the absolute gift of language.
There is a less charming side to productive morphology, of course. Once a pattern becomes available, nobody gets to control where speakers take it next. -Maxxing has spread well beyond its origins in looksmaxxing/manosphere communities, which is linguistically interesting but also means that the catchiness of a linguistic pattern can potentially help the ideas attached to it travel. I’m particularly hoping “pheromone-maxxing” doesn’t have much staying power – the idea that avoiding showers and deodorant will somehow maximize one’s attractive “natural pheromones.” Sometimes lexical innovation is more exciting than the cultural innovation it describes.
My favorite recent addition is actually rage bait – not one of the headline 2026 graduates, but a term I keep coming back to for personal and professional reasons. If you are the bewildered parent of a middle-schooler, learning the concept can suddenly explain a LOT. What fascinates me is that we’re no longer merely learning a new word for a familiar communicative intention. Sometimes the communicative goal itself is unfamiliar to the outsider. Deliberately provoking somebody into an exaggerated response can be part of the interactional game. That doesn’t mean genuinely harmful behavior suddenly isn’t harmful, but it does mean that something that looks like straightforward conflict, insult, or even bullying to an adult observer may be understood somewhat differently by the young people participating in it. For a sociolinguist, that is far more interesting than simply learning another piece of slang: you have to learn not only what the word means, but the interactional rules of the world in which the word makes sense.
Sometimes the “mistake” wins
I’d also be excited to see more of the wonderfully accidental ways language develops. There are several versions of this: folk etymology, where an unfamiliar form gets reshaped into something that makes more sense to speakers (bridegroom is a classic example: Old English guma, “man,” disappeared from use, and speakers reinterpreted the unfamiliar ending as groom), and malapropisms, where we accidentally substitute a similar-sounding word. Seriously, if you need a linguistic pick-me-up, look up malapropism examples. You’re welcome.
My current favorite is La Peace: a gamer pronounced lapis in lapis lazuli in a way that sounded like la peace, and Gen Alpha ran with it. Suddenly, a mispronunciation becomes a shared reference, then an in-group joke, then something people can reuse without needing the original context. Most such innovations disappear; occasionally, the “wrong” version sticks around long enough that it simply becomes language.
So what does the list say about us?
The clearest trend is how much vocabulary now documents digitally mediated life: vibe coding, AGI, compute, meme coin, parasocial. That makes sense. New technologies do not merely give us new objects; they give us new activities, relationships, anxieties, skills, identities, and problems that become worth distinguishing from one another. But I’m equally interested in words that name experiences, relationships, feelings, and social types: cuffing season, Sunday scaries, crashout, neckbeard, looksmaxxing. We seem to enjoy having compact ways to recognize both ourselves and the kinds of people and experiences around us. Once something has a name, it becomes easier to recognize it, discuss it, joke about it, identify with it – or very deliberately identify against it.
And then there’s Rickroll, which personally made me laugh. I think I first encountered Rickrolling sometime just after the pandemic, when we were moving back into classrooms and everybody seemed particularly ready for something silly, harmless, and communal. To me, it felt like exactly the kind of supposedly meaningless but weirdly endearing shared joke people needed. Turns out I was extremely late to the party. Rickrolling traces back to 2007, growing out of an earlier bait-and-switch internet prank called duckrolling. So discovering that it had already lived an entire internet lifetime before I encountered it – and is still circulating strongly enough to graduate into Merriam-Webster in 2026 – is wonderful.
It is also a perfect reminder that “new to the dictionary,” “new to me,” and “new to the language” are three completely different things.
More broadly, vocabulary is our cultural archive. A dictionary update like this is a little like holding up a mirror to society at a particular moment. What are we doing? What are we worrying about? What are we laughing at? What kinds of people do we think we are? What experiences do we encounter often enough that suddenly we need a name for them?
The answers keep changing. Naturally, so do the words.