Oxford English Dictionary Adds ‘ROFL’ and ‘Scooby Snacks’

The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes a few words you’d never think the dictionary would want to define and a few that it seems should've been defined long ago.

For instance, the Internet-speak additions include ROFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”) and tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”). According to the OED editors, the latter term was first used in 2002 “when it formed the entirety of a crushing response to another Usenet user’s thoughts on the computer game Metroid Prime.”

There’s also “listicle,” defined as a “(usually depreciative) term applied to an article in a newspaper, magazine, or especially on a website, presented wholly or partly in the form of a list, and first recorded in 2007.” (We don’t know anything about those, nope.)

Another surprising addition: They’ve decided to add “Scooby Snack”:

OED.com

The dictionary has only just now traced the history of terms like “sister from another mister” and “power couple,” which also made it into the latest update, along with a longer entry for “sleeping with the fishes." The linguistic authority credits that phrase to what Jonathan Dent, the OED’s senior assistant editor, describes as “a threat made in the nineteenth century by disgruntled German villagers against an English angler who was depleting the stocks of their trout streams.” (Sorry, mobsters.)

Check out the full list of new words is here.