Lexbuzz Edition #44: A 70-Year-Old Word Joins the Dictionary
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Hi, Word Lovers!
Can you feel close to someone you’ve never met — and who doesn’t even know you exist? There’s actually a word for that — and it was coined way back in 1956, when television was bringing strangers’ faces into our living rooms.
Now, 70 years later, that word has finally made its way into Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, joining a batch of 1,400 new words and definitions added this Tuesday. Funny how some feelings take a very long time to get a name, isn’t it?
🌀 Weekly Word Wonder: PARASOCIAL
Pronunciation: /ˌpærəˈsəʊʃəl/ (pair-uh-SOH-shul)
Part of speech: Adjective
Definition: Relating to a one-sided emotional connection with someone you do not know personally, such as a celebrity, a presenter, or an online creator.
Origin: Coined in 1956 by the American sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, in a paper in the journal Psychiatry about how television viewers formed "para-social" bonds with figures on screen. The Greek prefix para- means "beside" or "alongside", so the connection runs alongside a real friendship rather than with one. The word stayed in scholarly writing for decades before social media carried it into everyday speech.
Usage:
- For seventy years parasocial described a viewer and a screen; this week Merriam-Webster gave it a plain-English definition.
- Her parasocial attachment to the podcast hosts was strong enough that a change of format felt like a personal loss.
📖 What's Special?
Merriam-Webster's 1,400 additions read like a diary of the past twenty years. Rickroll is now a verb, meaning to trick someone into hearing Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up". Trash panda is Merriam-Webster's own informal label for a raccoon.
Copium, shapewear and the Mandela Effect (the false-memory phenomenon) all cleared the dictionary's bar of steady, widespread use over time. Plenty of the new entries run to two words (meme coin, cuffing season, Sunday scaries), and several are hyphenated.
Lexulous is played with single words, so those stay on the page rather than the board.
More about parasocial...
Lexicographers were not the first to notice. In November 2025, Cambridge Dictionary named parasocial its Word of the Year after lookups climbed sharply. Its chief editor, Colin McIntosh, said the word was "originally coined as an academic word and was confined to the academic sphere for quite a long time."
🧩 Community Puzzle
Jumbled Letters: Unscramble these words.
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EISONMLOG (A word coined for a new idea or thing) →
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YOLMTGOYE (The study of where words come from) →
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SAGLSOYR (A list of terms and their meanings, often at the back of a book) →
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IXLECNO (The vocabulary of a language, or a dictionary of it) →
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ROFOP (A printer's trial copy of a page) →
Last Week's Answers (Edition #43)
Jumbled Letters
- PREONIE — PIONEER (one who goes first or opens new ground)
- DNUERE — ENDURE (to last, to persist over time)
- YROLG — GLORY (great honor or renown)
- URTOC — COURT (the playing surface where the game is held)
- AIELG — AGILE (quick and nimble; moving with ease)
Until next week, keep playing.
— The Lexulous Team
