Low carb, queer, selfie: 5,000 new entries added to German dictionary



BERLIN, Gisela Gross (dpa) - Some 5,000 words including queer, selfie, emoji and fake news are being added to the German dictionary's new edition, its head of editorial told dpa Monday.
"It's simply a fact that many things from the Anglo-Saxon world appear in our lives when you consider technological developments," Kathrin Kunkel-Razum, head of editorial for the Duden dictionary, said.



Duden is the German equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary.
New additions related to technological developments include liken (to like on Facebook), cyberkrieg (cyber warfare), facebooken (to use Facebook), entfreunden (to unfriend on Facebook).
Other new English-language entries reflect lifestyle and pop culture trends, including urban gardening, low carb, hoodie, roadtrip and work-life-balance.
Hygge, the Danish concept of coziness, was also entered.
A handful are about the administration of US President Donald Trump and other current developments, such as Brexit.
Postfaktisch, German for post-factual, is being entered to refer to a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy.
Duden's first-ever edition - published in 1880 - had 27,000 words, while the newest edition, which goes on sale Wednesday, has 145,000.
Duden is advertising its new edition - priced at 26 euros (31 dollars) with slogans intended to appeal to a younger audience. They include: "More common than hate crimes: criminal spelling," and "Not at all sexy: if you spell tinder wrong."
"We want to show the different things you can do with language," said Kunkel-Razum. "Not just relatively dry dictionaries."
The previous edition is from 2013 and sold some 850,000 copies. Duden's editorial team famously added the word shitstorm to that edition, which in Germany is used to refer to a scandal.
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Tuesday, August 8th 2017
Gisela Gross
           


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