Our Common Hellscape Is Officially a Thing, and Other New Dictionary Words

Are you a digital nomad? Are you rage farming today’s hellscape? Then congratulations, you deadass helped induct those new terms into Dictionary.com’s latest update. 

The COVID-19 pandemic made us more familiar with folks fortunate enough to telecommute while living the digital nomad life on the road, and you’ve certainly seen people rage farming (defined as “the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents”) in the problematic hellscape (“a place or time that is hopeless, unbearable, or irredeemable”) that is online discourse today. 

And as for deadass… it’s a flexible term that can mean “seriously, completely, genuinely, sincerely, or truly; in fact.”

These are just four of the 313 new words, 130 new definitions and 1,140 revised definitions added to Dictionary.com’s online repository of language in its new revision. 

“Language is, as always, constantly changing,” said John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, in a statement. “Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that unstoppable swirl of the English language — not only to help us better understand our changing times, but how the times we live in change, in turn, our language.”

Other additions include trauma dumping, petfluencer, antifragile and forever chemicals, the latter referring to the pervasive problem of PFAS in the environment. 

The pandemic has also helped usher in new health-related terms like superdodger, meaning “anyone who, for unverified reasons, remains uninfected or asymptomatic even after repeated exposure to a contagious virus.”

The dictionary’s latest edition also sees the addition or revision of a number of terms related to gaming and, for some reason, bread. Paratha, anyone?

Nobody ever said our language had to be gluten-free, and I deadass think both our discourse and our pizza are better for it.