From 'Mommy Blogger' to 'Aunt Flo,' Here's What's Officially Been Added to the Dictionary

Congrats, you spoke these words into existence.

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Published February 13, 2018

Image: iStock

Venturing onto pregnancy and parenting community boards and online groups can feel a lot like learning a new language. But as long-standing members of The Bump can attest, before long, BFP and burp cloth are equally loaded with meaning. The folks at the Oxford English Dictionary have taken notice. And their 2018 update includes a slew of parenting-related words, terms and abbreviations.

“With a wealth of parenting (and grandparenting) experience between us, we’ve been noticing a steady uptick in new word suggestions added to our in-house database on the related subjects of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting,” reads a release note on parenting words. “This distinctive lexicon maps a whole range of human experience, from immense joy to immeasurable sorrow and, considering its relevance to so much of the population, it seemed an underrepresented category of vocabulary in our dictionary.”

So they got to work, combing through pregnancy books, baby feeding guides and user submissions to see the kind of language parents are taking in every day. Then, they consulted online forums to see how parents are actually communicating with each other.

“We decided to ask the experts—parents—for their opinions. We took our search to online parenting forum, Mumsnet, asking their users to tell us the words and phrases they thought we should consider.”

They found something interesting: While it was hard to evaluate the medical jargon and abbreviations they came across based on their process of assessment for inclusion, they found the internet was “teeming with evidence of these words in daily use, as parents—mothers especially—seek of offer up advice and anecdotes.” In other words, parents spoke these words into official existence.

We went through the list of all the new words to pull out the ones applicable to pregnancy, parenthood and the conception journey. Not sure what something means? Our community glossary can help translate.