AskOxford: Bubbling Under

English is a language on the move, with many hundreds of new words and phrases coming into existence every year. Although these are picked up by Oxford's worldwide monitoring programme, many of these coinages have only a fleeting lifespan and may never appear in the dictionary. This feature takes a look at some of the most recent and interesting words, phrases, and other language changes which have caught our eye and which could be vying for a place in one of our future dictionaries.

Language Report Poll Results

A few months ago, OUP and AskOxford.com launched a poll to see what you thought the word of the century thus far. Susie Dent selected a shortlist of nine which she outlined in The Language Report 5: English on the move, 2000-2007.

The brief was simple: choose the word that would best represent the mood and events of the first years of the 21st century. Over 1,000 people took part - and the results are in!

The winning word, with 248 votes, was 9/11. The name by which the terrorist assault on the Twin Towers in New York is now widely known as, it is also seen as the initilization of all the political, miltary, and emotional motions that have followed in its wake.

Next on the podium was Footprint, narrowly losing out with 226 votes. Since the millennium, the English language has seen as significant a 'greening' process as the popular culture has. According to data from the Oxford English Corpus, 'footprint' is now regularly paired with 'carbon' and 'ecological'; at the start of the centruy, these words were rarely seen together.

And coming an honorable third, with 144 votes, is Sex Up. This phrase came into greater currency after a BBC report by the journalist Andrew Gilligan that British intelligence documents on Iraq had been 'sexed up' in order to justify war. The phrase 'sexing up' was soon applied to any number of contexts, from one's body and bedroom to further political documents where spin was suspected.

The losing words on the shortlist were: Axis of Evil; Bling; Bovvered; Sars and Bird Flu; Bowser; and Chav. These and many others are listed in The Language Report 5 - which was published on 4 October 2007 - is the indispensable annual update on the English language, eagerly awaited by word-buffs everywhere.

Discussing the 'Word of the Century', Dent said 'Like "ground zero", it illustrates perfectly how history can be preserved in just a word or phrase - in this case the simple statement of a date - which is packed with associations and which will evoke it instantly.'