It was a ginormous year for the wordsmiths(1) at Merriam-Webster. Along with embracing the adjective that combines "gigantic" and "enormous," the dictionary publishers also got into Bollywood, sudoku and speed dating.

But their interest in India's motion-picture industry, number puzzles and trendy ways to meet people was all meant for a higher cause: updating the company's collegiate dictionary, which goes on sale this fall with about 100 newly added words.

As always, the yearly list gives meaning to the latest lingo in pop culture, technology and current events.

There's "crunk(2)," a style of Southern rap music; the abbreviated "DVR," for digital video recorder; and "IED," shorthand for the improvised explosive devices that have become common in the war in Iraq.

If it sounds as though Merriam-Webster is dropping its buttoned-down(3) image with too much talk of "smackdowns" (contests in entertainment wrestling) and "telenovelas" (Latin-American soap operas), consider it also is adding "gray literature" (hard-to-get written material) and "microgreen" (a shoot(4) of a standard salad plant.)。

No matter how odd some of the words might seem, the dictionary editors say each has the promise of sticking around in the American vocabulary.

"There will be linguistic conservatives(5) who will turn their nose up at(6) a word like `ginormous,'" said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."

One of those naysayers(7) is Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.

"A new word that stands out and is ostentatious(8) is going to sink like a lead balloon," he said. "It might enjoy a fringe(9) existence."

But Merriam-Webster traces ginormous back to 1948, when it appeared in a British dictionary of military slang. And in the past several years, its use has become, well, ginormous.

Visitors to the dictionary publisher's Web site picked "ginormous" as their favorite word that's not in the dictionary in 2005, and Merriam-Webster editors have spotted it in countless newspaper and magazine articles since 2000.

That's essentially the criteria(10) for making it into the collegiate dictionary — if a word shows up often enough in mainstream writing, the editors consider defining it.

But as editor Jim Lowe puts it: "Nobody has to use `ginormous' if they don't want to."

1. wordsmith：語言大師

2. crunk：曠課樂，Crunk=Crazy+Drunk。Crunk Music在國內(nèi)經(jīng)常被翻譯成曠課音樂，由南部說唱衍生而來，更有舞曲的風(fēng)格。Crunk音樂的真正全球化要得益于Usher的《Yeah！》的驚人成功，這首歌使全世界刮起了一陣Crunk風(fēng)暴，從街頭到舞廳，從流行歌手到說唱藝人都加入到這種新的音樂風(fēng)格中。

3. buttoned-down：傳統(tǒng)的

4. shoot：Shoot一詞在植物學(xué)上的翻譯一直存在爭議，很多翻譯中把它翻譯成苗、莖、莖干或枝務(wù)和地上部等。

5. conservative：保守派

6. turn one’s nose up at：對…嗤之以鼻

7. naysayer：反對者

8. ostentatious：賣弄的

9. fringe：邊緣的

10. criteria：標(biāo)準(zhǔn)