PEN PLANET

More than 530 new words, from 'deep state' to 'dad joke' New words are a happy fact of life for a living language, and taking careful stock of the words that we use is an important part of the work of dictionary editors. Words can come and go in a language, but those that show staying power and increasing use need to be recorded and described. In other words: they need definitions. So here they are. In our latest batch of updates, which includes 533 new words and new meanings added to the dictionary (not to mention more than 4000 other revisions to definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and dates of first known use ), we see a cross-section of newly-established vocabulary ranging from the serious to the playful, from the technical to the informal—with a bit of everything in between. Among the new additions: 'free solo,' 'escape room,' 'red flag law,' 'fatberg,' 'autogenic training,' and the nonbinary pronoun 'they.&

Xenophobia  has been around for a long time, the  word  ' xenophobia ' is relatively new—our earliest citation is from 1880.   Xenophobia  was formed from a brace of  words  found in ancient Greek, xenos (which can mean either " stranger " or " guest ") and phobos (which can mean either enophobia —" fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners "—has the look and feel of a word that has been in the English language for hundreds of years, borne of the tumultuous political climates of the Renaissance and the penchant that many writers back then had for fashioning fancy new words from Latin and Greek.  It is not that old. In fact, the word is relatively new (with an emphasis on "relatively"), with all evidence suggesting that it originated near the end of the 19th century. Our earliest citation is from 1880  "flight" or "fear"). Dictionary definitions of  xenophobia  include: "deep-rooted fear towards foreig