Oxford Languages October 2023 updates
Oxford Languages product updates are based on evidence collected by our expert in-house lexicographers, and include new words, senses, definitions, and revisions of existing content. These updates ensure our data reflects current usage and keeps our datasets comprehensive.
Our October 2023 update sees additions and updates to our flagship datasets, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), as well as to relevant audio sound files.
We have added more than 230 new headwords, phrases, and senses to our English monolingual datasets, including content in different class domains such as technology, science, medicine, and the environment.
As the advancement of technology continues to expand at an ever increasing rate, so does the language that follows. This is reflected in the October 2023 update with the additions of words such as alt text, cryptoeconomy, digital age, and facial recognition.
Another key theme seen in this update is language surrounding science, medicine, and the environment with alcohol use disorder, amoebocyte, forever chemical, gigafactory, heat island, hypnic jerk, Li-ion, nanomachine, ultracapacitor and more added to ODE and NOAD.
Other notable additions include Black Vernacular English, cold open, direction of travel, folk horror, gajillion, hidden homeless, nudge theory, parasocial, quantitative tightening, recency bias, spidey sense and wokeism. Along with newly added phrases like asking for a friend, blow a hoolie, break bad, down with the kids, get the memo, no cap, and play in Peoria.
Nearly 1,400 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected for this release. User feedback was implemented and corrections made where appropriate.
Major entries revised include: AI, artificial intelligence, consent, conspiracy theory / theorist, elementary particle, immersive, interactive, popcorn, scam.
Full entries were created for 200 previously undefined derivatives, including altruist, ambassadorial, bullfighter, characterless, circularity, dandyish, exemplification, greenwashing, immunosuppressed, loyalism, pugilistic, rock and roller, and typicality.
We also revised and standardized our policy on derogatory terms and added derogatory labels to 340 words and meanings as part of our sensitivity project.
IPA transcriptions and audio pronunciations were created for new entries. We have created approximately 1,300 new pronunciation transcriptions, and approximately 2,600 new pronunciation audio files.
The following datasets have been updated on the Oxford Dictionaries API with hundreds of new and revised entries:
- ODE & NOAD
- Oxford Thesaurus of English (OTE)
- English sentence dictionary
- English linked inflections
- Spanish monolingual
- Spanish bilingual
For more information about this release, please visit our dedicated Oxford Dictionaries API updates page here.