“Skibidi” and “Tradwife” are now part of the Cambridge dictionary

What does skibidi come to the English language?

“Skibidi”, pronounced Ski-Bi-Di-Di-di, is one of the terms of slang popularized by social media which are part of more than 6,000 additions this year in Cambridge Dictionary.

“Internet culture changes the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said Colin McIntosh, lexical program director at Cambridge Dictionary, the largest online dictionary in the world.

“Skibidi” is a term of gibberish invented by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean everything, from “cool” to “bad”, and is also used without real meaning as a joke.

Other planned additions include “tradwife”, a contraction of the “traditional woman” referring to a mother married to so -called traditional values – often the one who cooks, cleans and publishes on social networks – and “Delulu”, a shorting of the word “delusional” which means “to believe things that are not real or true, generally because you choose”.

Tiktok influence in some cases

Christian Ilbury, lecturer in sociolinguistics of the University of Edinburgh, said that many new words are linked to social media platforms like Tiktok because most of the young people communicate.

However, Ilbury said that some of the words, notably “Delulu”, have longer stories than people might think and have been used by speech communities for years.

An increase in remote work from the pandemic has created the new “Mouse Jiggler” dictionary entry, a device or software used to give the impression that you work when you are not.

Environmental concerns are at the origin of the addition of “Forever Chemical”, a harmful substance that remains in the environment for a long time.

Cambridge Dictionary uses the Cambridge English Corpus, a database of more than two billion written and spoken English words, to monitor how new words are used by different people, how often and in which contexts they are used, the company said.

“If you look at the function of a dictionary, it is a public recording of how people use language and therefore if people now use words like” skibidi “or” delulu “, then the dictionary should take it into account,” said Ilbury.

McIntosh added that the dictionary added only words that he thinks that the “rest”.