Our Common Hellscape Is Officially A Thing, And Other New Dictionary Words

Are you a digital nomad? Are you cultivating rage in today’s hell? So congratulations, you’ve helped bring these new terms into the latest Dictionary.com update.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us familiar with people lucky enough to telecommute while living the digital nomad life on the go, and you’ve certainly seen people doing rage farming (defined as “the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents”) in the problematic hellscape (“a hopeless, unbearable, or irremediable place or time”) that is the discourse online today.

And as for deadass… it’s a flexible term that can mean “seriously, completely, genuinely, sincerely, or really; in fact.”

These are just four of the 313 new words, 130 new definitions and 1,140 revised definitions added to Dictionary.com’s online language repository in its new revision.

“The language is, as always, constantly changing,” John Kelly, senior editorial director at Dictionary.com, said in a statement. “Our team of lexicographers document and contextualize this unstoppable whirlwind of the English language – not only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in are, in turn, changing our language.”

Other additions include trauma dump, petfluencer, antifragile chemicals, and forever, the latter referring to the pervasive problem of PFAS in the environment.

The pandemic has also helped usher in new health-related terms like superdodger, meaning “any person who, for unverified reasons, remains uninfected or asymptomatic even after repeated exposure to a contagious virus.”

The latest edition of the dictionary also sees the addition or revision of a number of terms related to games and, for some reason, bread. Paratha, anyone?

Nobody ever said our language had to be gluten-free, and I think our speech and our pizza are better for it.