From onboarding to hive mind, Merriam-Webster adds more than 250 words to online dictionary

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Merriam-Webster
(Merriam-Webster Image)

Merriam-Webster.com, the online home for the 150-year-old dictionary brand — or, “provider of language information,” as they call themselves — has added more than 250 new words and definitions, it announced on Monday.

From technology and business to sports and social media and politics, the evolution of language isn’t slowing down and, as Merriam-Webster put it in a news release, some terms are “proving themselves too useful to ignore.”

Around the office, you’ve probably seen a new co-worker or two and heard about onboarding, “the act or process of orienting and training a new employee.” Whether or not you like that term and how viciously you react to it on social media could make you a troll.

All of the devices that keep you from actually reading a print dictionary these days may be part of the Internet of Things, “the networking capability that allows information to be sent to and received from objects and devices (such as fixtures and kitchen appliances) using the Internet.”

Perhaps you can check in with the hive mind — “the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people (such as Internet users) regarded as functioning together as a single mind” — to determine whether you’re susceptible to the threat of ransomware, “malware that requires the victim to pay a ransom to access encrypted files.”

Merriam-Webster had some fun with it all on Twitter using another word in its dictionary: GIF.

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