Notes on OED's December 2008 release of new words

ew int.

Joining a large family of imitative words expressing disgust or aversion, ew takes its place, alongside ugh, ough, auh, yah, pew, faugh, and many more, on the list of words which have attempted to tackle the age-old problem of how to represent in print what are essentially inarticulate sounds. Even within the scope of this one entry, many different opinions prevail as to how one should spell ew, as the variants section shows: we have found examples of euuw, euuww, euw, euww, ew, and eww, plus instances in which even more "u"s or "w"s (or both) are pressed into service: as many as 6 "u"s or 16 "w"s have been sighted.

plus-one n.

A word of relatively unusual etymology and evocative meaning, plus-one is an invitational convention—that of indicating that a named invitee may bring one unspecified guest by following the name with the words ‘plus one’—made flesh, as a noun used to mean the extra person who attends an event or party under the auspices of these words. Interestingly, this is not the first time the word plus has been involved in this sort of process of word-formation—the dictionary also records plus four n. and plus two n.—although it is the first time outside the realm of trousers.

podcasting n.

A very new word, for a recent phenomenon, and a great example of how technological change, especially that relating to the Internet and the media, can be a driving force not only in generating new words, but in determining whether they survive and succeed. In this case the rapid adoption of podcasting (the technology) as a means of making audio material available has seen podcasting (the word) move quickly from its first tentative steps in 2004, as only one of a number of suggested names for the process, to near-ubiquity in 2008. The current OED quarterly release also includes other members of the same family: podcast as a noun and a verb, podcaster, and even the somewhat ungainly adjective podcasted.

Rashomon n.

An indication of the wealth and variety of influences which are at work on the English language, as Japanese cinema gives us this word, which alludes to the method of storytelling used in Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film of this name, and is used attributively to denote things involving multiple conflicting or differing perspectives. The underlying simile is first invoked in English in the adjective Rashomon-like, which dates back to 1962, and is also included in this release of new and revised OED text.