The word ‘blockchain’ is added to the Oxford Dictionaries web site, along with ‘Redditor’ and an additional meaning of the word ‘miner’. It reflects the growing use of the words in English language.

The August update, published on the OxfordWords blog, includes 46 new words from various areas of life. Some of them reflect nothing but the changes in common parlance – for instance, the word ‘hangry’ (mixing ‘hungry’ and ‘angry’, meaning ‘bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger’). Others introduce new realities, among them such words as ‘Brexit’ and ‘Grexit’ (meaning possible exit of Britain from European Union and of Greece from eurozone) or ‘cat café’ – ‘A cafe or similar establishment where people pay to interact with cats housed on the premises’.

Among other words, included in the update and reflecting the new realities, is the ‘blockchain’ – ‘A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly’. The word ‘miner’ now means not only ‘a person who works in a mine’, but also ‘a person who obtains units of a cryptocurrency by running computer processes to solve specific mathematical problems’. The example phrase, illustrating the new meaning of the word, is ‘anyone can become a bitcoin miner’. ‘Redditor’, ‘a registered user of the website Reddit’, is another word included in the update.

The Oxford Dictionaries web site does not add new words very often. The word ‘bitcoin’ became a part of the dictionary only update in 2013, followed by ‘cryptocurrency’ in 2014. According to Angus Stevenson, the editor of the dictionary:

“New words, senses, and phrases are added to Oxford Dictionaries Online when we have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English.”

Alexey Tereshchenko