It’s official: WTF is in the dictionary. It’s short for an informal phrase that starts with “what the …” and is “used especially to express or describe outraged surprise, recklessness, confusion, or bemusement.”
WTF joins emoji, NSFW, net neutrality, clickbait, click fraud, photobomb and other words reflecting modern life among the latest entries in Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary. Some 1,700 words have been included, along with 3,200 new examples to add context.
The new entries speak to what’s current in the English language today, touching on technology, food, the worldwide food supply and the sharing economy.
In the world of food, we have crema: “a layer of tan creamy froth that forms on the top of freshly made espresso.”
And what’s not to love about chilaquiles, “a Mexican dish of fried corn tortilla pieces simmered with salsa or mole and typically topped with cheese and other accompaniments”?
Not all the dictionary’s additions are that delicious.
There’s colony collapse disorder, “a disorder of honeybees (Apis mellifera) that is characterized by sudden colony death due to the disappearance of all adult worker bees in a hive while immature bees, the queen bee and the honey remain and that is of unknown cause.”
The collapse of hives is a challenge for worldwide agricultural research, the dictionary entry claims.
Wait a minute, did your boss just notice that you were reading this story instead of working? You’re better off looking at this than porn, which is definitely NSFW: “not safe for work.”
