On Thursday, OxfordDictionaries.com sent out a press release that successfully tricked many news outlets into writing a headline with the word awesomesauce in it.
Oxford University Press was announcing the new spate of words that can now be looked up on its website after a quarterly update — the list includes manspreading, butthurt, microaggression, Grexit, hangry, and cat cafe.
These new words have not been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical reference book that shows how words change in meaning or become obsolete over the centuries instead of focusing on modern usage. However, the distinction between the OED and OxfordDictionaries.com seems less than useful since many of the words being added in this quarterly update are already historical or obsolete, such as “manic pixie dream girl.”
For other words — like cupcakery or beer o’clock — it is unfortunate that scholars are not devoting resources to discover their first usage yet, as the people who first uttered them should be held accountable for their actions.