WASHINGTON — Dictionary.com's latest update added hundreds of new words and definitions to the online database and a couple of the latest additions have been gaining extra attention on social media.
The website explained in its announcement that the prominent themes for its first big update of 2021 "reflects how our language is still catching up to the tremendous change we experienced last year, from the pandemic to protests to politics."
There are new terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic, like hybrid learning, and changes to previous entries to reflect the profound impact of 2020's social justice movements.
According to the site, it revised more than a dozen entries in its dictionary to remove the noun slave, and replaced it with the adjective enslaved or a reference to the institution of slavery. Another edit included capitalizing Indigenous for all relevant entries on the site.
Among the 600 new words and definitions are "supposably" and "finna." When Dictionary.com tweeted out some of the new words, those two additions racked up thousands more quote-tweets than any of the other words.
Dictionary.com says the adverb "supposably" means "as may be assumed, imagined, or supposed." It describes "finna" as "a phonetic spelling representing the African American Vernacular English variant of fixing to."
Dictionary.com isn't the first to add "finna" to its entries. Merriam-Webster also added "finna" to its online dictionary last April. According to the site, it's already among the top 1% of words that are looked up.
