Meanings of New Dictionary Words

New words are constantly being added to our dictionaries. Do you know these words and their meanings?

·         blursday noun. Informal. a day not easily distinguished from other days, or the phenomenon of days running together.

·         cakeage noun. a fee charged by a restaurant for serving a cake brought in from outside. The word cakeage (often used in the phrase cakeage fee) is modeled on corkage, the term for the fee charged for bringing wine to a restaurant.

·         chatbot noun. a computer program designed to respond with conversational or informational replies to verbal or written messages from users.

·         decision fatigue noun. Psychology. Psychiatry. mental and emotional exhaustion resulting from excessive or relentless decision-making, especially the cumulative effect of small decisions that one makes throughout each day.

·         digital nomad noun. a person who works remotely while traveling for leisure, especially when having no fixed, permanent address.

·         jump scare Ever watch a horror film and find yourself literally jumping out of your seat, like when the murderer with the bloody hatchet pops out of nowhere or the alien curls its gangly fingers swiftly around the door frame? This is officially known as a jump scare, a “scripted moment (as in film or video game) intended to startle the audience.”

·         liminal space noun. a state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way. Example: The classroom when school is out for the summer is a liminal space.

·         mountweazel noun. a decoy entry in a reference work, such as a dictionary or encyclopedia, secretly planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content.

·         trauma dumping noun. unsolicited, one-sided sharing of traumatic or intensely negative experiences or emotions in an inappropriate setting or with people who are unprepared for the interaction.

·         petfluencer noun. a person who gains a large following on social media by posting entertaining images or videos of their cat, dog, or other pet.

·         Zhuzh When a dish, an outfit or your writing needs a little more oomph or extra sparkle, it needs some zhuzh. This “small improvement, adjustment, or addition that completes the overall look, taste, etc. of something” can be a dash of cinnamon in your latte, a riff at the end of a song or a pun that spices up a dull headline.

·         988 The telephone number for a mental health crisis hotline staffed by licensed counselors and other staff trained in suicide prevention.