Oxford Languages June 2024 updates
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 June 2024 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 June 2024 update with the additions of words such as generative AI, prompt engineering, and training data.
Another key theme seen in this update is language surrounding science, medicine, and the environment with cosmic web, cryosphere, heat dome, interoception, megadrought and more added to ODE and NOAD.
Other notable additions include dairy-free, emerging market, ethical monogamy, fan service, First People, global majority, side quest, ultra-processed, and wrongthink.
More than 4,000 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 aerobatic, auto-eroticism, crookedness, double-crosser, dualist, extemporization, monetarist, nepotistic, relativist, structuralist, sublimation, and zesty.
We conducted two major projects to ensure that our content remained up to date and appropriate for all users:
The project on The Language of Disability involved revising more than 80 entries and adding terms such as D/deaf, disablism, dysmorphism, hearing impairment, legally blind, and vision-impaired.
For the Women’s Health project we revised more than 60 entries, dealing with topics such as menstruation, menopause, and childbirth.
Pronunciations in the form of IPA transcriptions and audio have been created for all new entries added in this release. Pronunciation additions and improvements have also been made to 6,730 existing entries.
More than 750 entries have been edited or revised.
Sensitive content (particularly that relating to the language of disability) was reviewed and updates made, and user feedback was implemented.
New synonyms have been added to more than 150 entries, for example fugazi at counterfeit, catfish at cheat, impairment at drunkenness, like taking candy from a baby at easy, beakish at hooked, and feel someone's pain at sympathize.
The Sentence Dictionary data has been updated with new examples for all new senses and headwords added to our English dictionaries this year, as well as new examples for many other words and senses that had previously lacked them – over 4000 new examples in total. New examples have been added for words such as ultra-processed, twindemic, prompt engineering, and roadman, phrases such as good shout, don’t at me, break bad, and not on my watch, and new senses of intercept, facilitate, and cap.
The Simple Sentences data has been reviewed and expanded for the 2024 update. There have been three main areas of development:
- Addition of sentences for new words and inflections: more than 1000 new examples have been added to the data. The majority of the new additions are made up of words requested by Google for the previous update, and include inflections such as morals, yourselves, murmured, envied, misbehaving and dwindled, as well as more technical or rare words such as declarative, demesne, epistemic, eponym, and mimesis. Examples for prominent new words and senses have also been added, such as ultra-processed, prompt engineering, parasocial, heat dome, and fugazi. Additional examples have also been added as part of the US senses review, discussed below.
- Review of US senses coverage: the data has been reviewed to ensure key US senses are covered, with additional examples added for US-specific senses of words such as mad, athletics, biscuit, cater, jumper, allotment, diaper, and zipper.
- Sensitivity review: the data has been reviewed for sensitivity, with a focus on political content, words relating to mental health and disability, and women’s health.
Most of our English datasets have been updated on the Oxford Dictionaries API with hundreds of new and revised entries.
For more information about this release, please visit our dedicated Oxford Dictionaries API updates page here.
Around 20 new headwords, senses, and compounds have been added to our Portuguese monolingual data, including prompt (prompt for AI), digital (involving or relating to the use of computer technology), and reconhecimento facial (facial recognition).