Happy New Year! And welcome back to Webb’s Weird Words; we were on a multi-week hiatus while your local linguist labored on seasonal fare like Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life.

And while we’re on the welcome wagon: a hearty “Woo-hoo!” for the exciting new update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Released in November, the long-awaited 12th edition is MW’s first revamp in over two decades.

So in honor of the new year, let’s look at some of the 6,000 trendy terms that have been added to this gold standard among dictionaries.

Beast mode – “An extremely aggressive or energetic style or manner that someone (such as an athlete) adopts temporarily.” Often styled as go beast mode.

Clickbait – Headline or other item designed to get you to click on a hyperlink — “especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest.” IDK about you, but I plead guilty to falling for this — around 155 times a day. (BTW: “IDK” has also been added — along with “BTW.”)

Dad bod – An average father’s physique — in other words, “one that is slightly overweight and not extremely muscular.” Um, yeah — guilty here too. Likewise on this next one:

Doomscroll – “To spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry, etc.” Sample quote from the MW entry: “Stop doomscrolling. You don’t need to know every detail of every tragedy. And you certainly don’t need to see what all those strangers on the internet think about it.” Amen to that!

Dumbphone – A cell phone without advanced features like a browser or email (in contrast to a “smartphone,” of course). I’ve used this term for years, totally unaware that it was a thing — though in my case, I’m not sure it’s the phone that’s dumb.

Ghost kitchen – Another new one to me: It’s a kitchen for meals consumed elsewhere — that is, for preparing food ordered on an app and received by delivery service.

Hack – As a noun, verb or adjective, this versatile term has more than a dozen meanings: chop; cough; mediocre (“hack work”); tolerate (as in, “I couldn’t hack it”) — even the now-standard sense of gaining access to a computer or network (“they hacked into my system”).

But its newest use is the one found, for instance, in a phrase like life hack: “a clever tip or technique for doing or improving something.” That in turn comes from the tech-world, where hack means a “creatively improvised solution to a computer hardware or programming problem.”

Hard pass – “A firm refusal or rejection.” This too is new to me — maybe because I still haven’t learned how to do it. Ugh.

Listicle – A blend of its two constituent words, this is “an article consisting of a series of items presented as a list.” Like the one you’re reading.

Petrichor (pronounced PEH-truh-kor) – “A distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period.” A blend of “petr(o)” and “ichor” (you can look those up on your own), petrichor was introduced by Australian chemists more than 60 years ago.

Rizz – Probably short for “charisma,” this means “romantic appeal or charm.” Can also be a verb — though I promise I will never, ever use it that way. (Really — “she rizzed me”? No thank you!)

Teraflop – “A unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second.” The italicized phrase there (which I still don’t understand, even after looking it up) is abbreviated as flop — with tera being the base for “trillion.”

Touch grass – “To participate in normal activities in the real world especially as opposed to online experiences and interactions.” For me, this term is new — but not the experience, thank God; I’m glad they have a word for it now. I used to just be called “real life.”

Truther – “Someone who believes that the truth about an important subject or event is being concealed from the public by a powerful conspiracy.” Don’t even get me started on this.

WFH – Popularized during the COVID era, this is an abbreviation for “work from home.” And here I thought it stood for “work fewer hours”! Oh, wait….

Others newbies in the 12th edition: adulting, beach read, bestie, bingewatch, Bitcoin, bot, cancel culture, cold brew, dashcam, emoji, fanfic, photobomb, ransomware, snark, takeaway, troll and woke.

I just ordered my own hard-copy. Maybe next week we can take a deeper dive into some of its worthwhile features.

In the meantime: More touching grass and less doomscrolling — please.