Twerking, the term
most recently used
to describe Miley Cyrus’ raunchy dance performance at the MTV awards, has made it into the Oxford dictionary along with a slew of words like ‘selfie’ and ‘Digital detox’.
The move, which the 20-year-old US singer and actress showed off with the help of singer Robin Thicke, has already set tongues wagging, and now it has been included in the latest revision of Oxford Dictionaries Online. The dictionary defines twerking as a “dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.”
Other terms included in the dictionary are: “selfie” for a camera-phone self-portrait, “digital detox” for time spent offline and “click and collect”, the shopping phrase, ‘Sky News’ reported.
Twerk” is around 20 years old and seemed to have been coined as part of the “bounce” hip-hop scene in the US, said Katherine Connor Martin, from Oxford Dictionaries Online. “By last year, it had generated enough currency to be added to our new words watch list, and by this spring, we had enough evidence of usage frequency in a breadth of sources to consider adding it to our dictionaries of current English,” she said.
“Likely theory is that it is an alteration of work, because that word has a history of being used in similar ways, with dancers being encouraged to ‘work it’. The ‘t’ could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch,” she added.
Cyrus, who first rose to fame as the lead in Disney children’s show Hannah Montana, made headlines with the risque performance on Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” at the awards in New York.
The show also saw her perform a medley of her party song ‘We Can’t Stop’ while twerking furiously with the singer-songwriter, the report said. Words such as “street food”, “pear cider” and “food baby” – a swollen gut, were also included in the quarterly update for the site. (PTI)