Macquarie Dictionary Blog

Five possible new words for July

We may be in the depths of winter, but the new words are still running hot!

In fact, our first new contender is for a source of heat you don’t want to be anywhere near. It’s gigafire: a fire that burns between 100,000 and 1 million hectares. With global warming causing increasingly extreme weather events, researchers have had to coin new terms to categorise bushfires by their destructiveness, and gigafire is one such term.

We turn from hot to cool with our next word, drip. It’s already a headword in the dictionary, obviously, but there are a few emerging slang senses that aren’t in yet. If someone has drip (or the drip) they’re stylish; drip can also refer to stylish clothes or accessories themselves; people and things can drip and they can be drip – so there’s a whole suite of new senses relating to stylishness across the most common parts of speech!

You may or may not have drip, but hopefully you don’t have a phone bone. If you’re aware of some of the seedier senses of bone, it might sound raunchy, but it’s very much not – it’s an actual bone spur that forms on the back of the skull, caused by the stooped posture associated with phone use.

Two more words to round out July. First, skin hunger, a faintly creepy term for the desire for loving or friendly physical contact with another; second, tuxedo cat, a cute term for a black cat with white markings on its chest and paws, resembling a person wearing a tuxedo.

Do you think these new words should enter the Macquarie Dictionary? Let us know!