Sunday scaries, cuffing season, uncanny valley: Merriam-Webster’s new words for modern anxiety

📌 Copium: Merriam-Webster categorises this new entry, a blend of ‘cope’ and ‘opium,’ as slang, and defines it as “avoidance, denial, or minimisation…imagined as a narcotic.”

In a sentence: Putting off Sunday Scaries with an unhealthy dose of copium might not be the best idea.

📌 Crashout: Merriam-Webster has updated its entry to include the meanings, “a mental or emotional breakdown,” or “an emotional outburst or tantrum.”

In a sentence: I have been tiptoeing around Ramesh after his crashout when he learned he had been passed over for promotion.

📌 California sober: It refers to a person using marijuana and/or alcohol but abstaining from other drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamine.

In a sentence: Thomas is on copium if he says he is six months sober—California sober, maybe?

📌 Cuffing season: The word “cuffing” comes from African-American English. It refers to romantic partnerships and was popularised by rap and hip-hop music. Cuffing season refers to a sociological trend in which people look for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with. The phrase was first recorded in 2009.

In a sentence: For many, cuffing season is a way to stave off depression.

Representational image to depict new words added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. (Generated using AI)

📌 Uncanny valley: This word describes the revulsion evoked by the imperfect, lifelike quality of something that simulates a human, such as a doll, robot, AI-generated image or voice, or computer-animated character.

The term comes from Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s 1970 hypothesis that humans’ affinity for objects that simulate human characteristics sharply drops and is replaced by a feeling of eeriness. The phenomenon is shown on a line graph that depicts the “valley” of the sharp drop and subsequent rise in affinity.

In a sentence: With AI slop flooding the internet, we get pushed further into an uncanny valley.

📌 Mandela effect: This term comes from numerous people who misremembered that South African president Nelson Mandela died in prison. It is a “phenomenon in which many people collectively misremember a specific fact, event, or detail consistently.”

In a sentence: All of us swore Sunday Scaries was a Gen Z invention, but as it turns out it is just the Mandela Effect, because older generations have been dreading Mondays just as long.

Other words added to the dictionary include whack-a-mole, vibe coding and AGI (artificial general intelligence), parasocial, Rickroll, meme coin, promposal, letterboxing, and edible items such as superfood, cake pop, shishito, and bao bun.