The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added new East African words and phrases in its September 2024 update, among them ‘panya route’ and ‘kitu kidogo’.
The latest update was announced Wednesday and includes more than 600 new words, phrases, and senses.
‘Panya route’, part of which is derived from the Swahili word for rat, gets an entry in the dictionary as a noun to mean “A secret path or roundabout route; especially one used for smuggling.”
‘Kitu kidogo’, borrowed from Swahili where it translates directly to ‘something small’, meanwhile becomes an official English noun to mean “Money offered or accepted as an inducement or bribe.”
The other words and phrases in the latest updates are ‘African massage’ (The shaky, jolting effect of being in a vehicle driven on a bumpy, uneven African road) and ‘Bantu knot’ (A section of hair twisted and coiled into a small, tight knot, as part of a hairstyle consisting of several such knots arranged to form a pattern).
Others are ‘cheap ass’ (A stingy or miserly person), ‘cheap-shit’ (Shoddy; of cheap or inferior quality) and ‘Dholuo’ (The language of the Luo people of Kenya and Tanzania, a member of the Nilotic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Cf. Luo, n. A.2).
“This was a particularly busy update, which included words from Caribbean, Bermudian, East African, New Zealand and Welsh English,” said Catherine Sangster who is OED’s head of pronunciations.
The Oxford English Dictionary is published by Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom and is the principal historical dictionary of the English language.
The dictionary published its first edition in 1884.
In 2022, the dictionary added a number of common Kenyan words and phrases to its roster, among them ‘mpango wa kando’, ‘chapo’, ‘uhuru’, ‘nyama choma’, ‘githeri’, ‘chang’aa’, ‘busaa’, ‘come-we-stay’, ‘jembe’, ‘buibui’, ‘sambaza’, ‘sheng’ and ‘collabo’.
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