The Dictionary Finally Learns to Talk Like Everyone Else

Merriam-Webster has added 1,400 new entries to its online dictionary, and a handful of them will sound familiar to anyone who has sat through a dinner party debate about the internet lately. Among the additions: rickroll, parasocial, and looksmaxxing, each now carrying the imprimatur of an official definition. It is the kind of quiet institutional catch-up that rarely makes news on its own, yet marks the moment informal shorthand becomes something a newspaper, a professor, or a grandparent can look up without apology. The capital's conversations, it turns out, were ahead of the reference books.

With reporting from The Hill.