From 'delulu' to 'skibidi': Online slang now in the Cambridge Dictionary

If you are a millennial or a baby boomer who has ever looked down their pedantic nose when Gen Z or Alpha have tossed around words such as “delulu” and “skibidi”, you will have to update your vocabulary because the Cambridge Dictionary has. 

While it is no surprise that social media has a notable impact on the lives of those who use it the most, in this case, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it is not every day that the informal language of the internet gets a formal nod by one of the world’s authorities on the English language, in this case, the Cambridge Dictionary. 

The lexical programming team at Cambridge Dictionary, led by Colin McIntosh, has updated the dictionary to include 6,000 new words. Some of the most newsworthy ones come from social media slang.

"It's not every day you get to see words like skibidi and delulu make their way into the Cambridge Dictionary," said Colin McIntosh, lexical programme manager at the Cambridge Dictionary, as per the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"We only add words where we think they'll have staying power. Internet culture is changing the English language, and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary," he added.

English purists may find such an addition to be an act of blasphemy, but linguistic experts would argue that there is no ‘pure’ English to begin with. The language spoken by the people of England is referred to as English, just like Finnish is spoken by the people of Finland.

However, the English language itself is a mixture of different languages, including French, Latin, Greek, Norse, etc., according to a study by Finkenstaedt, Thomas & Dieter Wolff (1973).

Additionally, due to the widespread expansion of the British Empire, English spread across the globe via colonisation and evolved in its host nations, giving the world American English, Indian English, etc. 

While the grammar, sentence structure and basic principles of the language are the same across the world, widespread use of made-up words, such as “prepone”, “blog”, or “selfie” eventually leads to popular dictionaries around the world adding them to their lists.

Social media dominates the world right now; hence, it is not surprising to see its impact on spoken language.

Similarly, throughout history, cultural movements have shaped vocabulary: nautical terms and phrases flourished during the Age of Exploration, military terminology surged during periods of war, and sports jargon became widespread at the peak of sporting enthusiasm.

Popular phrases like “all hands on deck”, “under the weather”, and “coming on board” are all nautical in origin, used even when humans stopped sailing the seas to explore more continents. It is more likely for a client to “come on board” now than the pirates. 

You also have the war to thank if you ever missed a “deadline” which made you “bite the bullet” with your boss and left you “shell shocked”.

On a lighter note, sporting terminologies like “home run”, “underdog”, and “level the playing field” also dominate conference rooms now. 

More recently, the outbreak of COVID-19 gave the world words such as “pandemic”, “lockdown” and “social distancing”. 

Social media has become the focal point of 21st-century culture, attracting a wide range of controversies and criticisms. When reputed dictionaries of the world update themselves to stay relevant with social media, one really has to ask in confused amazement, “What the skibidi is happening?”