The revised edition of the Dictionary of Modern Standard Chinese has just been released, and with it, more than 100 new terms — many slang or online neologisms — have been granted admission to the august realm of official Chinese lexicons.

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The new entries include weixin (微信), or WeChat, the hugely popular social messaging service operated by Tencent. There are also some older words recently revived and repurposed for contemporary use, such as tuhao (土豪), literally translated as tu, or “dirt,” and hao, or “despotic.” Commonly used in the 1930s to refer to local tyrants, tuhao today derides a new privileged class that has emerged in China: people who are “extremely wealthy but lacking in education or values,” according to the dictionary’s definition.

But why did weixin and tuhao make the cut, while other, seemingly equally popular terms were shut out? Not admitted to the new edition were such words as diaosi (屌丝), literally “silk penis” but meaning “loser”; shengnü (剩女), or “leftover woman”; shengnan (剩男), “leftover man”; and baifumei (白富美), meaning “white, rich and beautiful.”



Li Xingjian, the chief editor of the dictionary, said a team of about 30 language experts worked for more than three years with help from the state-backed National Languages Committee to select the new terms. They took into account three main considerations: whether the term has entered public discourse, whether circulation of the term has stabilized and whether the term meets a minimum level of tastefulness.

“We considered and discussed a huge list,” Mr. Li said in a telephone interview. “A term like diaosi is not very tasteful, and it’s unlikely to endure for much longer. And shengnü, we just thought it wasn’t that significant. It’s used a lot by young people online, but otherwise people don’t really use it.”

“On the other hand, tuhao has always been around. It has a mocking meaning, but it’s not necessarily derogatory,” he said. “Plus we think it’ll stay around for a while, because in real life there really are these kind of people and therefore a need to describe them.”

The Dictionary of Modern Standard Chinese, first published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2004, is appreciated especially by scholars and those interested in contemporary usage. It is not the first reference dictionary in China, however. That honor still goes to the New China Character Dictionary and the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, older texts that are widely used in schools and offices and slower to exhibit change.

Every five years, the Dictionary of Modern Standard Chinese is revised, with outdated words dropped to make room for new ones, said Mr. Li.

But to David Moser, a specialist in Chinese linguistics, the exclusion of shengnü — “leftover woman” — in the new edition is “risible.”

The term has been used in state media to describe a woman over 25 who is unmarried and thus a source of shame, and it has been criticized by feminists as evidence of an overly patriarchal society. A few women have managed to turn it around, into a homonym with a different meaning: 胜 女, or “victory woman.”

“To justify excluding the new word on the grounds that it is only used by young people online is risible,” Mr. Moser, the academic director of CET Beijing Chinese Studies, wrote in an email.

“There are hundreds of millions of young people online, and usage is usage, whether in a blog post or uttered over coffee at Starbucks,” wrote Mr. Moser. “There are already dictionaries and databases that do include this word, three of them on my Pleco software alone (The Oxford Chinese Dictionary, the CC-CE Dictionary from MDBG, and the KEY Chinese Dictionary).”

In linguistic terms, however, a distinction between “use” and “mention” is relevant and does provide some justification for the exclusion, Mr. Moser wrote.

Many people mention the word “in that it was a topic of controversy,” he said. “But Li Xingjian is probably right that far fewer people were actually using the word (e.g. ‘I’m worried because my daughter is now a shengnü.’).”

“Once the hype fades, it may no more be a part of the Chinese language than ‘twerking’ will be a part of English after Miley Cyrus”—the American singer— “goes on to something else,” he wrote. “This being China, one has to also suspect political motives here, as well. It is not a word that the Party would like to be enshrined in dictionary-entry perpetuity.”

Here are some of the other words, along with their definitions, that have been added to the latest Dictionary of Modern Standard Chinese:

Zheng nengliang (正能量): Positive energy. Originally a term used in physics, popularized by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman to describe the energy that helps people build up self-confidence and optimism. Tucao (吐槽): Quick, sharp criticism of dialogue or events that are perceived as violating norms. Paizhuan (拍砖): Hit with a brick. An expression meaning to oppose or criticize a viewpoint. (Mostly used on the Internet.) Jie diqi (接地气): Connected to the earth’s energy. Being in touch with real life, in accordance with objective reality; also to penetrate the grass roots, to experience and observe the condition of the people, resolve practical problems.

Some other newly admitted terms are clearly related to recent news events:

Digouyou (地沟油): Gutter oil. Waste oils illegally used in cooking. Shilian (失联): All communication lost. A popular phrase following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Xikeli wu (细颗粒物): Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5. A measurement of air pollution.

They join phrases that had gained enough currency to have been added to the previous revision, in 2009: