Merriam-Webster’s new words say a lot about our AI doomsday fears

Merriam-Webster just officially recognized 1,400 new words, and they bring the lexicon of the AI era into the dictionary. On average, Merriam-Webster adds about 1,000 new entries every year, usually in large batches. Its editors are constantly reading widely to identify emerging words, and then searching through databases to determine whether those words are being used frequently, meaningfully, and widely. According to the company’s blog post on the topic, a word gets into a dictionary when it is “used by many people who all agree that it means the same thing.” This year’s newly minted terms include the usual sprinkling of zeitgeisty additions, including “looksmaxxing,” “Sunday scaries,” “crashout,” and “neckbeard.” Meanwhile, the editors’ selection of tech-ajacent words says a lot about the gloomy chapter of the AI era we’re currently living through. Into the “uncanny valley” Merriam-Webster has yet to release the full compendium of its newly recognized terms, but the four tech words it has confirmed paint a fairly stark picture by themselves. First, the dictionary’s editors have added “compute” in its noun form—meaning, “the computational resources (such as memory and processing…