11 Words Merriam Webster Just Added to Its Dictionary That Could Have Been Left Out

Unpopular opinion: just because a word or  abbreviation is frequently used in modern day communication doesn’t mean it definitely belongs in the dictionary.

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Just this week, Merriam-Webster added 455 new words to its dictionary and several of those words include abbreviations and slang terms that people often use on social media.

Since 1831, Merriam-Webster has been publishing reference books such as dictionaries and each year, it adds new words based on their use in society which is, apparently, a whole process in which editors “scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and inflected forms–in short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the dictionary.”

But here’s my thought– are those words really going to stick around? 50 years from now, will we still be texting “FTW” to each other? Probably not. Which raises the question of how long a word should be in use before being added to the dictionary.

By the way, FTW was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and if you have no idea what it stands for, it’s an abbreviation for “for the win.”