Spring 2025 update
As language continues to evolve, our dedicated language experts regularly update our datasets to ensure our business partners’ dictionary displays, games, mobile applications, and other solutions stay current with modern English.
Our Spring 2025 update brings exciting enhancements to our flagship datasets, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), along with updates to relevant audio sound files.
We’ve introduced over 210 new headwords, phrases, and senses to our English monolingual datasets. These additions span various domains such as science, medicine, technology, and the environment, and include a diverse array of words from our World English programme.
New entries
As the advancement of technology continues to expand at an ever increasing rate, so does the language that follows. This is reflected in the Spring 2025 update with the additions of words such as CubeSat, hallucinate, and large language model.
Other key themes seen in this update surround science, medicine, and the environment with climate breakdown, hispi, microlaga and more added to ODE and NOAD.
Other notable additions include brain rot, cheap date, doggy day care, Generation Alpha, nepo baby, semantic bleaching, and tech bro.
Our World English programme focused particularly on terms and words from Welsh, Scottish, Australian, New Zealand, and Caribbean English, such as bulla, cuzzy bro, diolch, Lorne sausage, m?rena, tantie, and much more.
Revision
More than 3,000 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected for this release. User feedback was implemented and corrections made where appropriate.
Full entries were created for 100 previously undefined derivatives, including antonymous, botanic, competency, congeniality, coordinated, derisible, exceptionalist, intrigued, mutually exclusive, racialized, tinkerer, and untouchability.
Audio pronunciations
Pronunciations in the form of IPA transcriptions and audio have been created for all new entries added in this release. We have also made improvements to the pronunciations in a large number of existing entries.
Oxford Thesaurus of English
New synonyms have been added to more than 100 entries, for example boi at adolescent, bad actor at criminal, warfighting at combat, nervous Nelly at coward, teacher’s pet at flatterer, and sheisty at deceitful.
Entries revised include alcohol, babe, Christmas, phone, starving, seduce, and manly and womanly. Links with the dictionary text were improved where necessary.
Sentence dictionary
The Sentence Dictionary data has been updated with new examples for all new senses and headwords added to our English dictionaries this year, representing nearly 4,000 new examples in total.
New examples have been added for words such as cheat code, content creation, cyberstalk, de-age, end-of-life, gigil, girlboss, K-beauty, neobank, sando, and sheisty, phrases such as cry me a river, fail upwards, lose one’s lunch, and over one’s skis, and new senses of core, filler, flow, product, reset, and slap.