Spring 2023 update
As language evolves, our language datasets are frequently updated by our language experts to support our business partners and keep their dictionary displays, games, and mobile applications, among other solutions, aligned with the current English.
Our April 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 the Oxford Thesaurus of English, Sentence Dictionary, and relevant audio sound files.
We have added hundreds of new headwords, phrases, and senses to our English monolingual datasets, including content in different class domains such as science, medicine, and technology.
New entries
Almost 300 definitions completely new headwords, phrases, and senses were added to ODE and NOAD.
Science, medicine, technology, and the environment continue to be prominent themes in our updates, with the additions of atmospheric river, bomb cyclone, carbon budget, foveated rendering, puberty blocker, and syndemic.
Some other notable additions include altcoin, availability bias, brigading, chonky, confuddle, cultural imperialism, groomzilla, headcanon, hotword, menstrual cup, permacrisis, Remoaner, soy boy, and space force.
Revision
Nearly 1,000 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected for this release. Major entries revised include globalism, sectarianism, frontier, and pioneer.
Sensitivity project
In this release, our sensitivity projects included the revision of 350 entries which include language relating to Indigenous peoples and cultures in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US.
Consultation of several representatives and members of Indigenous Peoples was undertaken to gain understanding and establish which terms are most acceptable to their communities while also being clear to a general audience.
Etymology
500 etymologies were updated in line with research carried out for the historical OED project, in most cases to take account of earlier first uses identified by the researchers.
