OED welcomes moobs, gender-fluid and yolo

Moobs, gender-fluid and yolo are among more than 1,000 words and terms recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Moobs, a term for unusually prominent breasts on a man; gender-fluid, describing a person who does not identify with a single fixed gender; and yolo, the acronym for the phrase “you only live once”, made the cut in the OED’s quarterly update.

Food-related terms including chefdom and cheeseball will appear in the new edition alongside yogalates, the combination of yoga and pilates, and Westminster bubble, an insular community of politicians.

To celebrate the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth, the OED is also publishing new and revised entries for words the author used in his writing, including Oompa Loompa, scrumdiddlyumptious and human bean.

Michael Proffitt, chief editor of the OED, said: “The inclusion in OED of a number of words coined by or associated with Roald Dahl reflects both his influence as an author and his vivid and distinctive style. For many children Roald Dahl’s work is not only one of their first experiences of reading, but also their earliest exposure to the creative power of language.”

Moobs – a contraction of the expression man boobs – first appeared in the young adult novel The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants in 2001. Gender-fluid was first recorded in 1987.

Other interesting additions include fuhgeddaboudit, a US colloquialism reflecting an attempted New York or New Jersey pronunciation of the phrase “forget about it”.

The OED describes itself as “an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over 829,000 words, senses, and compounds – past and present – from across the English-speaking world”.

There have to be several independent examples of a word being used, as well as evidence it has been used for a reasonable amount of time, before it can be included.