Merriam-Webster has added 1,400 new words and definitions to its dictionary, with the latest update drawing heavily from social media slang, artificial intelligence terminology, food trends and modern lifestyle vocabulary.
The dictionary said the new entries reflect words and meanings that have shown widespread use over time, offering what it called a window into the world today.
Social media culture accounts for several additions, including looksmaxxing, parasocial, Rickroll, meme coin and promposal, along with a new digital sense for letterboxing, a term that already carried a 19th-century meaning tied to an outdoor pastime.
Technology-related entries include compute as a noun, referring to a resource increasingly sought by tech companies, alongside vibe coding, AGI (artificial general intelligence), and uncanny valley, used to describe the unsettling feeling produced by something artificial that looks almost, but not quite, human.
Food and drink terms making the cut include superfood, described in the dictionary as food such as salmon, broccoli or blueberries that is rich in nutrients, as well as cake pop, shishito (a slender, usually mild chilli pepper from East Asia), bao and chilli crisp.
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Several new words capture shifts in how people live and describe their moods, among them cuffing season, defined as the time of year when unattached people look for a short-term romantic partner to see them through the colder months, along with Sunday scaries, crashout and whack-a-mole. Yacht rock and California sober also feature among the additions.
Other updates include shapewear, a refreshed definition of neckbeard, and the addition of copium, alongside trash panda and Mandela Effect — the latter describing the phenomenon of people confidently misremembering something, such as believing a word already existed in the dictionary when it did not.
Merriam-Webster said the expanded list was part of its ongoing process of tracking how language evolves and gains currency in everyday use, rather than a one-off update tied to a single cultural moment.
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