Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Adds More Than 500 New Words, Phrases, and Senses, Including Hidden Gem, Tumbleweed, Origin Story, and Al Desko (September 2025 Update)

From OED/Oxford University Press:

The autumn is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere. We’re back at work after the summer break, the new school year has begun, and we’re once more getting up early, or at crack of sparrow’s song (or, more humorously, crack of sparrow’s fart,or simply crack of sparrow’s) to get ready for the day. ‘What fresh hell is this?’ we hear you cry as you wrap up warm because it’s nobbling (a Welsh word to describe very cold weather). Well, while we can’t eradicate the back-to-school blues, we hope you’ll find some of the selection of new words below shortsome (a chiefly Scottish term for ‘enjoyable, lively, or entertaining, especially so as to give the impression that time is passing quickly’). Hopefully you’ll discover something new about already familiar terms, encounter some hidden gems (something or somewhere that has importance, value, or beauty, but is not immediately obvious or widely known), and perhaps be surprised by some of their origin stories. Let’s get crackalacking.

Earlier this year, an episode of the BBC competition programme Race Across the World brought new attention to one of several new Welsh English additions in this update—the word poody. When two of the show’s contestants used poody in an interview, they were astonished when the producer didn’t recognise the term. This exchange illustrated a common experience—sometimes we need to go outside of our own linguistic circle to realize that words that we thought were universally understood are unique to the language variety that we speak.

Our earliest example of poody dates from 1986, when it is used colloquially with the meaning ‘to have a fit of sullen or petulant ill temper; to sulk’. It is an example of a reborrowing, or ‘boomerang word’—a word that has been borrowed from English into another language and then borrowed back into English. Poody comes from the Welsh pwdu ‘to sulk’, which itself comes from the English word pout combined with the Welsh verb-forming suffix -u. A later noun form,referring to a fit of sullen or petulant ill temper or a childish sulk, is now used chiefly in the phrases in a poody and to have a poody.

Other loan words from Welsh in this update include various greetings and polite expressions, including diolch (thank you), nos da (good night), croeso(welcome), and shwmae (hello, hi).

If you frequently consume lunchables (food items suitable for lunch, especially pre-packaged food products) with your lunch hooks (originally and chiefly a U.S. term for hands or fingers) at your desk during the working week, we have a word for you: al desko. A humorous alteration of the term al fresco (itself first borrowed into English from Italian in the 1730s), it’s chiefly used to describe eating lunch at an office workstation, but it can also be used more generally to refer to any action carried out at one’s desk that would more typically be done elsewhere. Other additions in the newly revised desk range include deskfast (a blend of desk and breakfast referring to at-desk eating), desk rage (an aggressive outburst of anger or frustration in the office), and desk worker (a nineteenth century alternative to office worker, sometimes used to imply a lack of practical knowledge or experience of the field in which someone works).

Shifting attitudes to our own mortality are reflected in the addition of death doula, a person who provides (non-medical) practical and emotional support to a dying person and their family. Also found as end-of-life doula, these terms from the mid-2000s repurpose the word doula, more typically used of a person assisting at a birth. The adjective end-of-life is also new to the OED this quarter, and our research to-date suggests—surprisingly—that its use with reference to the breakdown or failure of a product predates reference to death itself by 35 years.

Another range of words recently revised are those relating to binge. Although binge-watch and binge-watching were added to the OED several years ago, this update has added several synonyms to this cluster in the form of binge-view and binge-viewing. The term binge viewer, although rare before the twenty-first century, turns out to be the earliest of these televisual terms, making its first appearance in 1980. Even earlier is binge-reading, recorded first in a 1978 letter from Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence to another writer, detailing a period of ‘gloriously frivolous’ indulgence of her addiction to the Nero Wolfe detective novels of Rex Stout. Bingeable was originally applied in the 1980s to food and drink that could encourage overindulgence, and then from 2010 to forms of entertainment that encourage viewers, readers, or listeners to binge.

The hype range of words has also been fully revised for this update, and alongside new entries for hype man (a performer with a hip-hop or rap act who interacts with and excites the audience with call and response exchanges) and hyperpop(pop music with a highly energetic sound, specifically a playful or ironic subgenre of electronic dance music with a deliberately tacky, saccharine, or cartoonish aesthetic), are hype cycleand hypebeast. Hype cycle, first recorded in 1983, refers to a period of intense publicity or public or mass media interest surrounding an event or the launch of a new product (and the subsequent negativity when the hyped thing fails to live up to expectations). Hypebeast started out as an embodiment of the hype cycle: a notional creature, entity, or culture which thrives on or generates intensive publicity or attention. These days, it’s more likely to be used to refer to an ardent and ostentatious follower of trends in fashion and street culture and streetwear, always ready to show off their new trainers to their followers on social media.

Our next word is far from fashionable or trendy, certainly if you’re a poorly pet. It’s the protective plastic cone secured around the neck of an animal, especially a cat or a dog, so as to prevent it from licking, biting, or scratching a wound, surgical stitches etc.—otherwise known as the cone of shame. This humorous phrase was popularized by the 2009 Disney Pixar film Up!, and its golden retriever star Dug’s lament ‘I do not like the cone of shame…’. Although our illustrative quotations reflect a spike in usage in the year of Up!’s release, our researchers also found evidence that the phrase was already in use in x.com, then Twitter, in 2007. The earliest name for the cone of shame seems to have been the historically evocative (though not particularly accurate) Elizabethan collar, and our new entry contains evidence stretching back to 1900.

For the win – Typically used after the name of a person to indicate confidence in them or expectation of their ability to succeed, and more generally to express approval, dates from this century, with a first quotation from 2004.

That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in a few months with another update. In the meantime, let’seat that ‘to do’ list for breakfast(or for lunch, dinner, etc., meaning to completely or easily overcome or defeat someone or something), shall we?

Resources

• Overview
• New words in the September 2025 OED update: entirely new headword entries appearing in OED for the first time
• New senses in the September 2025 OED update: new senses integrated into the body of newly or recently updated entries
• Additions to unrevised entries in the September 2025 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 September 2025 update
• All Resources

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