Your Teacher's Wrong, "Sexting" IS in the Dictionary (and so is "Retweet")

Paul Lilly

Just so we're clear, " sexting " is a noun that means "the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone." It's a self-explanatory term to anyone locked into modern social media, and one that didn't officially exist outside of the realm of technobabble, at least until now. Sexting is one of the latest additions to the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

So is " retweet ," which qualifies as a verb meaning "(on the social networking service Twitter), report or forward a message (posted by another user)" or a noun describing "a reposted or forwarded message on Twitter, and " cyberbullying ," a noun used to describe "the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature."

Not all of the 400 new words are tech related, such as " mankini ," a noun for "a brief one-piece swimsuit for men, with a T-back," or you can just visualize Borat. According to the U.K.'s Telegraph , Oxford selected the new words after they were entered into a database with 2 billion words from contemporary websits and texts.

"It's how the dictionary has always worked -- we get as much evidence as we can so we know it's not just a small number of people using the word and it's not going to disappear," Angus Stevenson, the dictionary's editor, told Channel 4 News, according to The Telegraph. "There's no official panel of cabinet ministers for new words or anything like that."

The Oxford Dictionary hasn't been shy to recognize geek terms , or even acronyms like "OMG," "FYI," and "LOL." Neither has Merriam-Webster, which recognizes such terms as "malware," "webinar," "fanboy," and "tea-bag" (yes, that tea-bag).

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