As far as humans are concerned, the world didn’t exist until, well, they existed. That means anything that happened before you were born is mere fairy tales and make believe conversation. But what about those words that filled those tales and conversations? When did they start existing? When were those words born? Well, the Oxford English Dictionaries is here to tell you what words were born the year you were born.
The Oxford English Dictionaries took a look at all the words in their pages to find when certain words popped up for the very first time. They’ve covered 1900 to 2004 and plucked out one word for each year. Here are a few select words from certain years:
1945 — mobile phone
1948 — TV
1950 — big bang
1951 — blast off
1953 — frenemy
1955 — artificial intelligence
1958 — photo call
1970 — laugh out loud
1971 — reboot
1974 — Internet
1977 — nip and tuck
1978 — gazillion
1980 — foodie
1981 — chill pill
1982 — downloadable
1983 — air guitar
1984 — shopaholic
1986 — channel surf
1987 — bazillionaire
1988 — beatbox
1990 — emoticon
1991 — nu skool
1993 — geeksville
1999 — hacktivism
2004 — podcast
That doesn’t mean those were the only words invented, the OED shows that smartphone and text messaging and app were invented in the 1980’s but doesn’t attribute a single year to them. Still, it’s fun to see when the words we use today were born. You can use the OED’s tool here to find out what word matches your birth year. Let us know below.
Image from AP