In honor of Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday, The Oxford English Dictionary’s quarterly update includes a number of new and edited entries connected to Dahl and his writing.
The latest Dahl words added to the dictionary include: frightsome, scrummy, scrumptious, and splendiferous, and splendiferousness). The new edition also includes updates for some words. Gremlin, for instance, got a refresh. Check it out:
Our newly revised entry traces the origins of this mysterious word back to 1929 and its use as RAF slang to mean ‘a lowly or despised person; a menial, a dogsbody, a wretch’, while our earliest evidence for use referring to the destructive sprites so feared by Second World War pilots dates from 1938.