HONG KONG — With their special vocabularies, slang and jargon, Olympic sports seem to bring out the inner linguist in all of us.

When a Summer Games begins, we suddenly hear ourselves holding forth about Gabby Douglas favoring the Amanar vault over the Yurchenko. We knowingly deconstruct the wonderful violence of the ippon in judo. We patiently explain to others the difference between the clean and the jerk. We claim to know the foil from the sabre, and where to put the accent marks on épée. We explicate the various “thlons” — penta, deca and hepta.

Even if we’re full of it, it’s fun, right?

Students of Chinese also have been having some fun with the slang and jargon in the latest edition of the Xinhua Dictionary, the go-to reference book on Mandarin, China’s official national language. It’s a doorstop of a thing, over 700 pages.

The book took eight years to compile, according to the deputy editor, Zhou Hongbo, and many of the debut entries are derived from social media. New terms include “N.B.A.,” “animal conservation,” “credit-card slaves,” “social harmony” and “diplomagate,” a reference to the widespread faking of academic credentials.

China Digital Times has compiled a valuable dictionary of its own, the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, with the terms that Internet users employ in China to throw the government censors for an ippon. Rendezvous also has written about some of those politically loaded terms in China.

Eveline Chao, writing on Foreign Policy magazine’s Web site, has a fascinating look at seven of the new words and terms in the dictionary, including “house slaves,” “PM 2.5″ and “angry youth.”

“Banana person” also makes its first official appearance. Ms. Chao notes that the term “usually refers to Chinese-Americans — yellow on the outside, white on the inside — though unlike in the United States this is not pejorative.”

An excerpt from Ms. Chao’s piece:

This edition includes slang and online terminology for the first time — remarkable for an official Chinese publication for which informal language has long been prohibited. Indeed, the Xinhua Dictionary has always been a guide to what’s new and modern in China, but a few steps behind, aimed more at the masses less aware of the cutting edge. In the early days, it was like the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary rolled into one, teaching a mostly illiterate country about everything from umbrellas to fertilizer to how to write the word “pigeon.” There is unsurprisingly no entry for the Tiananmen Massacre, but it also leaves out shengnu (“Leftover Ladies” a common term which refers to aging, unmarried women) and the reappropriation of the word “comrade” to mean gay. “We abandoned these words because it’s kind of rude to label this group,” Jiang Lansheng, a linguistics expert from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was responsible for the revisions, told Chinese Central Television.

Chinese word for “gay” excluded from country’s new dictionary bit.ly/QvG9FE — comingout (@COatML) July 30, 2012

Some gay Chinese wanted a reference to homosexuality included in the definition of tongzhi, which translates literally as “comrade.”

“It’s unacceptable that the ‘gay’ meaning of ‘tongzhi’ was excluded from the dictionary, a reference book written for all, simply because of the compilers’ own preferences and values,” Nan Feng, an AIDS campaigner in Chongqing, told the official Xinhua news agency.

” ‘Tongzhi’ is the most commonly used, non-offensive term used by our circle to refer to homosexuals. We hope the compilers can view the word from an impartial standpoint.”

Ms. Chao also explains how N.B.A. has now become an official word in Mandarin:

The N.B.A. is by far the most popular sports league in China, domestic or foreign. The inclusion of this term reflects not just China’s rabid passion for all things “Kebi” (Kobe Bryant), “Aifosen” (Allen Iverson), and “Lin Shuhao” (Jeremy Lin), but also the inevitable impact of the United States on China — and vice versa. Just as English has many loanwords derived from Chinese and various dialects — including brainwash, yen (as in craving), silk, and even ketchup — Chinese has absorbed many words from English, like sandwich, sofa, bye-bye, bus, and chocolate. English letters are especially prevalent in online slang because English is much easier to type than Chinese. “3Q,” for example, is phonetic slang for “thank you” because the number three pronounced in Chinese (san) combined with Q sounds like “thank you.”