Cambridge’s latest addition of over 6,000 words shows how dictionaries have changed from gatekeepers into curators of our digital lives; Archives of our zeitgeist, they record the strangeness of being human
If you have managed to avoid the words skibidi, tradwife or delulu over the last few years, congratulations: you have probably been blissfully free of TikTok rabbit holes, X threads, and late-night doomscrolling. But for the rest of us who willy-nilly keep ourselves attuned to the churn of endlessly self-replicating memes, social media trends, and the goings-on in the virtual world, it was perhaps inevitable that these words would find their way into the pages of one of the world’s most authoritative arbiters of language: the Cambridge Dictionary.
The lexicographers at Cambridge have added more than 6,000 words and phrases to its official listings. Among them are two that epitomise the way online culture now shapes not only our daily conversations but the very structure of English itself. Skibidi, a nonsense word that first surfaced as a meme, has found its way into the canon of respectable words. So too has tradwife, a word with roots in retro domestic ideals and online debates over gender roles.
Other words include rizz, stan, finfluencer, nepo baby, deinfluencing, bed rotting, quiet quitting, situationship, bougie, digital nomad, cheugy, and receipts, among others. Each of these words now has a formal home in the respected dictionary. Colin McIntosh, Cambridge’s Lexical Programme manager, put it succinctly: “We only add words where we think they’ll have staying power. Internet culture is changing English, and it’s fascinating to capture in the dictionary.” All these words seem to have the requisite ‘staying power’.
The strange case of skibidi
To the uninitiated, skibidi may sound like gibberish. The term originates from a 2018 track by Russian rave band Little Big, whose absurd music video sparked waves of parody. By 2023, TikTok had resurrected it in a dizzying series of memes, including the now infamous “Skibidi Toilet” (pots with human heads) saga. On the internet, to call something skibidi could mean it’s cool, it’s weird, it’s bad, it’s simply beyond explanation or it could be used as a placeholder for “what on earth is going on?” As with much meme culture, its meaning rests as much on tone and context as on any fixed definition.
What is remarkable is not the word itself, but its elevation to dictionary status. Dictionaries have long been accused of lagging behind the living language. By the time a slang term is formalised, the cool kids have often moved on. But the fact that Cambridge chose skibidi is an acknowledgment that even nonsense words can reflect the way we express ourselves. Skibidi can be seen in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” which gave us “chortle” and “galumph.” In the 1920s, Jazz musicians popularised scat syllables — ba-doo-bah, scooby-doo — that were, like skibidi, initially nonsense but shaped the soundscape of an era.
One is also reminded of Dr. Seuss’s whimsical inventions that often slipped their way out of his rhyming worlds and into everyday language, shaping how we speak and even how we think. Perhaps the most striking example is nerd, which first appeared in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo as the name of a strange creature; within a decade, it had been absorbed into American slang to describe a socially awkward or bookish person, and today it is part of both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. Equally enduring is grinch, born in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), which now instantly conjures the image of a grouchy killjoy and is a fixture in dictionaries as well as seasonal headlines.
Other Seussian creations may not have reached quite the same ubiquity but is worth a mention here: The Lorax (1971) has become shorthand for an environmental advocate, invoked in discussions of conservation and climate change; Sneetches (1961) are often referenced in debates about prejudice and social hierarchies; and Yertle (1958), the power-hungry turtle king, is sometimes used as a metaphor in political commentary for authoritarian rulers. What began as playful nonsense words in brightly illustrated children’s books have, over time, migrated into the serious lexicon of culture and politics.
The work of lexicographers
If skibidi traces its origin to the playful, surreal side of internet linguistics, tradwife shows the darker, ideological undercurrents that also shape the lexicon. Short for “traditional wife,” the term refers to a woman who plays traditional gender roles, particularly the idea of staying at home to cook, clean, and support her husband. On the surface, it might sound quaint or even harmless. But online, tradwife has been weaponised in debates online. For some, it represents a personal choice or even a lifestyle aspiration. For others, it is a troubling marker of patriarchal values.
For dictionary makers, the challenge is enormous. They must sift through a torrent of new words, deciding which are fads and which have ‘staying power’. McIntosh and his team at Cambridge rely on vast databases of written and spoken English, analysing how often a word is used and in what contexts. The addition of more than 6,000 new words this year reflects just how quickly English is expanding in the age of digital communication.
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Each new entry gives us a sense of the time in which it was coined. In the internet age, words can gain traction in a matter of days, but many such words vanish just as quickly. Think of cheugy, which was once a viral word for something out of fashion, now rarely seen outside of thinkpieces about its decline. That skibidi and tradwife proved themselves to be more than mere passing fads. They encapsulate something about the current zeitgeist. Neither is likely to disappear overnight.
Language as living record
What makes the Cambridge Dictionary’s latest update fascinating is not just the words themselves but what they signify about our relationship with language. English, like most languages, has always been a magpie tongue, borrowing, inventing, and discarding at will. William Shakespeare alone contributed thousands of words, many of them experimental or playful. But never before has the process been so rapid, so global, and so visible.
Language grows in unpredictable ways, taking in its fold everything, from the ridiculous to the profound. The dictionary records and legitimises language. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary was a technical manual and a cultural statement, defining words with sly humour and a Tory sensibility. When Noah Webster compiled his dictionary in America, he deliberately reshaped spelling (“color” instead of “colour,” “theater” instead of “theatre”) as an act of national independence.
In other words, every dictionary is an argument about what words matter and why. And this is not the first time dictionaries have caught the attention of readers and language lovers with new entries. In the 1990s, Merriam-Webster added “McJob” (defined as “a low-paying job with few prospects”), prompting outrage from McDonald’s. In 2013, Oxford added “selfie,” drawing eye-rolls from traditionalists and purists.
Every generation thinks the new entries are frivolous until they become unremarkable parts of the linguistic furniture. Skibidi and other new words are simply the latest word to make that leap from novelty to norm. An English word-construction project that I have found immensely interesting is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, an attempt to coin and define neologisms for emotions that had long existed in human experience but had never been given names.
Koenig began this as a website and YouTube channel but it gradually grew into a phenomenon, resonating with readers and viewers who recognised themselves in these unnamed feelings. In 2021, Koenig compiled his work into a printed dictionary, giving a more permanent form to his catalogue of words that stretch language to meet the contours of our emotional lives. Its epigraph quotes comedian and actor Steven Wright: “I read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not just about inventing words but about shining a light on the ineffable strangeness of being human — the aches and joys that move beneath the surface of our days. You will find words like kenopsia, the haunting atmosphere of a place once bustling and now abandoned; dès vu, the sudden awareness that a present moment is already becoming a memory; or nodus tollens, that destabilising realisation that the plot of your life no longer makes sense, all give shape to emotions we recognise but rarely articulate.
There is énouement, the bittersweetness of standing in the future, knowing how things turn out but unable to tell your past self; onism, the frustration of being confined to one body, one place, one lifetime; and perhaps most famously, sonder, the staggering recognition that each passerby is the protagonist of their own story, while you are but a fleeting extra.
Dictionaries in the age of Internet
Traditionally, dictionaries were gatekeepers. They told you what was correct. Today, they are more like curators, documenting the exuberant chaos of living language. This role will only intensify as AI, social media, and global English accelerate change. What makes the 2020s unique is not that English is changing — it always has — but that it is changing at a faster pace. What once took decades of cultural assimilation and absorption now happens in months. Language is now keeping an eye out for the memes. For those on TikTok, Discord, and Twitter (or X, if you insist), words like “rizz” and “skibidi” will be familiar but for others — older readers, professionals outside internet culture — the words can feel like being dropped into a foreign language.
This is not entirely new. Slang has always been generational. Think of 1950s beatnik “cool” or 1990s hip-hop “bling.” Parents were always baffled by their children’s slang. The difference today is speed and scale. By the time older generations catch up, the internet has already moved on to the next linguistic fad. What dictionaries like Cambridge are trying to do is freeze these moments long enough to record them, a kind of linguistic snapshot of a rapidly evaporating present.
We may even imagine future dictionaries as dynamic, constantly updated platforms, more like Wikipedia than print tomes. Already, online dictionaries update in real time, tracking slang with unprecedented speed. The static, definitive dictionary may be obsolete; what we need instead is an archive that updates itself at the pace we live our lives. Perhaps, someday soon, an AI will comb TikTok and Reddit in real time, updating entries automatically. The dictionary of the future looks set to resemble a social media feed. So, what the skibidi is next? Nobody knows. That’s the beauty of English in the internet age.
