LONDON — What the skibidi is happening to the English language?
“Skibidi,” pronounced SKIH-bih-dee, is one of the slang terms popularized by social media that are among more than 6,000 additions this year to the Cambridge Dictionary.
“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online dictionary.
“Skibidi” is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean “cool” or “bad” or be used with no real meaning as a joke.
Other planned additions include “tradwife,” a contraction of “traditional wife” referring to a married mother who cooks, cleans and posts on social media, and “delulu,” a shortening of the word delusional that means “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to.”
Christian Ilbury, senior lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, said many of the new words are tied to social media platforms like TikTok because that is how most young people communicate.
However, Ilbury said some of the words, including “delulu,” have longer histories than people might think and have been used by speech communities for years.
“It’s really just the increase in visibility and potential uptake amongst communities who may not have engaged with those words before,” he explained.
An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the new dictionary entry “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of software used to make it seem like you are working when you are not.
Environmental concerns are behind the addition of “forever chemical,” a harmful substance that remains in the environment for a long time.
Cambridge Dictionary uses the Cambridge English Corpus, a database of more than 2 billion words of written and spoken English, to monitor how new words are used by different people, how often and in what contexts they are used, the company said.
“If you look at what a dictionary’s function is, it’s a public record of how people use language and so if people are now using words like ‘skibidi’ or ‘delulu,’ then the dictionary should take account of that,” Ilbury said.
McIntosh added the dictionary has only added words it thinks have “staying power.”
