Weird. Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reeks of capitalising on the zeitgeist for PR
> Usually dictionaries wait many years for words to be established before including them (it's a physical dictionary after all). Adding delulu reels of capitalising the zeitgeist for PR
Delulu is more than a decade old.
> it's a physical dictionary after all
Is the Cambridge Dictionary still physical-first? I know the OED has been digital-first since at least around the turn of the millenium (the last full physical edition was in 1989.)
I've definitely heard "delulu" years ago, probably floating around Twitter. There's a Wikipedia article on the word for some reason, and it supports this.
> The Oxford English Dictionary is often considered the more authoritative source on the English language, whereas the Cambridge Dictionary focuses more on modern usage.
The OED may take a while to add words sometimes, but it doesn't avoid slang; it aims for completeness rather than limiting itself to a particular formal register.
> Delulu, tradwife, broligarcy, and lewk, have all been added because experts believe the words will not be just a fad, but will have linguistic staying power.
The fact they've included that paragraph doesn't invalidate the question. Cambridge used to add ~500, maybe as many as 1000 words annually. In recent years it's climbed to 2000 but 6000 is rather unprecedented.
I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society.
There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable.
All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).
i've been on my phone/social/media/etc through the entire trend and this is the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up.
Might I suggest that tribe matters a lot in this context?
I don't listen to k-pop, I don't watch machinima, and I only knew 'tradwife' from the bullshit politics associated with the concept..
I think Cambridge called these too early. Maybe i'm old, and maybe i'm sheltered, but I never hear these words used in real life aside from a young nephew who was into the toilet thing, and he didn't so much use the word as just scream SKIBIDI while dancing around the room.
I'm fine with being old. Some trends you prefer to see sail away from you.
Delulu made it to Hansard*, the official government record of a G20 five eyes nation.
As an example, the Cambridge University Press cited a 2025 speech in parliament where Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used the phrase "delulu with no solulu" during the last sitting week before the election.
> the only time i've ever read the word 'delulu'; I had to look it up.
I'm going to be honest, I fully expect dictionaries to contain the definition of words I have to look up. What would be the point of a dictionary (or really any reference book) that only contains things I already know?
counterpoint:
I’m surprised “delulu” wasn’t already in OED and certainly would not consider it “cutting edge” slang in 2025 (quite the opposite). Just because one person hasn’t heard certain words doesn’t mean they don’t belong in what is meant to be a comprehensive dictionary. In fact, if you needed to know the meaning of every word that is added to the dictionary, then you would have no need for a dictionary!
Never having heard a word has nothing to do with whether OED “called it too early.” To make that judgment one would want to find external evidence.
There is an article of this kind every year where we all get a chance to be up in arms about the fact that language and culture is ever-shifting and changing and not something static.
The comments here really remind of the usual debate around Wikipedia.
Some people really want to see these tools as guardian and judge determining what should be worthy of inclusion rather than tools describing a reality external to them.
Wikipedia is a guardian and judge, whether it wants to be or not. Look how quickly politicians changed their policies after Wikipedia stopped bothsidesing the Gaza war. There were endless arguments on talk pages about how it shouldn't be called the "Israel-Hamas war" any more, since it's converted into a genocide of one side only. For more than a year. And then suddenly, once they agreed to change it, within only a couple of months, politicians across the USA and Europe start sanctioning Israel for committing a genocide. The same politicians who all the rest of the time said there was no genocide. Wikipedia is more powerful than it thinks.
Your mission for the week, should you choose to accept it, is to get one (or more) of the "words" tradwife, delulu, or broligarchy used in the acceptance criteria of one of your JIRA stories in progress without it being noticed or commented on in any way.
Is this "progress" or are we glorifying moving backwards by including this sort of language just to be "in"?
I really don't know how to feel about this, maybe it's my education making me bigoted, looking down upon what's clearly ephemeral; slang words like these come and go with time, and I think the timeframe for words to be included in the dictionary has greatly reduced.
Almost no one apart from a very small, terminally online subset of people will ever use these words and an even smaller subset will use these in IRL conversation; adding these is a bad idea and doesn't bode well for dictionaries wrt credibility.
They should release a DLC for dictionaries that covers slang like this, not make it part of the official English specification.
Dictionaries are not specs for the English language, they are wikis. Twenty years later when “delulu” (a word popular enough that my 65 year old father regularly uses it) has fallen out of style, new readers would find it very useful to get the word defined in the dictionary.
As in, "things that happened before my Xth year of life are Normal, nay, Traditional even. Everything afterwards is Ephemeral, and possibly Heresy as well."
Most English dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Odds are more people use these words than use a dictionary on a regular basis, and including them doesn't diminish the credibility of dictionaries unless you think their purpose is to curb the use of language instead of documenting it. Dictionaries include words labeled obsolete or archaic, informal and slang meanings, and even offensive and disparaging words without "glorifying" their use.
