The Oxford English Dictionary March 2024 Update Includes More Than 1,000 New and Revised Words, Phrases, and Senses

From the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford U. Press:

The Japanese language has long been a rich source of loan words for English and, this month, even more examples join the hundreds already recorded in the OED. We’ll begin with a selection of cooking-related words – sharpen your santoku knife and join us in the kitchen.

The noun hibachi is not entirely new to the OED, having first entered the dictionary in 1933 with the same meaning that it has in Japanese: a large earthenware pan or brazier in which charcoal is burnt, especially in order to warm the hands or heat a room. Earliest evidence of its use in English dates back to at least 1863, however when small, portable, charcoal-heated grills from Japan were introduced to the North American market in the mid-twentieth century, they were given the name hibachi, thereby giving rise to a different sense of the word in English

Hibachi also came to be used in North America to refer to a hot steel plate which forms the centre of the table in a Japanese restaurant. The word was later applied restaurants featuring such a hot plate, as well as to the Japanese or Japanese-style grilled food served there. These new senses all developed exclusively within North American English.

Katsu (a piece of meat, seafood, or vegetable, coated with flour, egg, and panko breadcrumbs, deep-fried, and cut into strips) is a good example of a Japanese-English reborrowing, or ‘boomerang word’. It comes from the Japanese word katsu, the shortened form of katsuretsu, which itself is a borrowing into Japanese of the English word cutlet. Katsu is recorded earliest in the OED in the compound katsu curry (first seen in 1976), a dish of chicken, pork, or other type of katsu, served with boiled white rice and a mild curry sauce.

 Learn More, Read the Complete Release

More Resources (March 2024 Update)

The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 1,000 new and revised words, phrases, and senses, including ultra-processed, charge station, and spy balloon.

• New words in the March 2024 OED update: entirely new headword entries appearing in OED for the first time
• New senses in the March 2024 OED update: new senses integrated into the body of newly or recently updated entries
• Additions to unrevised entries in the March 2024 OED update: new senses, compounds, or phrases appended to the end of existing OED entries which have not yet been updated for the Third Edition
• Platform updates: updates to the OED website for the OED March 2024 update

Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter in our new words notes by OED Senior Editor, Jonathan Dent: It’s the OED March 2024 update because… words.

The OED’s entry for gun, n. has been revised as part of this update. Who was Lady Gunnhild? Why are muscular arms referred to as ‘guns’? Find out in our revision notes by OED Senior Editor, Aliki Pantos: From battistas to baseball players: the revision of gun.

A new batch of words of Japanese origins have also been added to the OED in this update, including kintsugi and katsu. Read more in this blog post by OED World English Editor, Danica Salazar: Words from the land of the rising sun: new Japanese borrowings in the OED.

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