The Oxford Dictionary of New Words

all over again.

Sunday Telegraph Magazine 19 July 1987, p. 39

Unexpected changes in price or volatility might provide sudden and short-lived windows of opportunity to reduce costs or generate profits.

Energy in the News Third Quarter 1988, p. 10

windowed° (Science and Technology) see window°

windowedý adjective (Business World)

Of the security thread in a banknote: woven into the paper so that it is visible only in short stretches.

Etymology: A figurative use of windowed, alluding to the fact that the thread is partially embedded and partially visible.

History and Usage: Windowed threads were introduced in Bank of England notes in the mid eighties.

It is...the only means of incorporating security threads in the 'windowed' form which has become a feature of Bank of England œ20 and œ10 notes in recent years.

New Scientist 3 Dec. 1988, p. 84

windsurfing

noun Also written wind surfing (Lifestyle and Leisure)

The sport of sailing on a board similar to a surfboard, but using wind in a small sail rather than waves for its power.

Etymology: Formed by compounding: surfing in which it is the wind in the sail, rather than the waves, that supplies the

power.

History and Usage: The special board used in windsurfing (known by the trade mark Windsurfer) came on to the US market in 1969 and caused a craze on the West coast of the US in the seventies. By the beginning of the eighties the sport was well-known

outside the US; it first featured as a demonstration sport in the Olympic games of 1984. By that time, though, it had been decided that it should be known officially as boardsailing.

Despite this fact, windsurfing remains the name by which most people know the sport and the one which crops up most frequently in printed sources. The agent noun windsurfer and verb windsurf also remain frequent.

It combines lifestyle and adventure with wind surfing to make it more than just a sports magazine. He takes his cameras and windsurfers to exotic locations.

Auckland Metro Feb. 1986, p. 18

It is the event in the Windsurfing calendar with a spectacular display of the latest in watersports equipment...and fashion from jetskis and paraskis for the active enthusiast to dayglo surf shorts for those who just want to don the look.

Woman's Journal Mar. 1990, p. xiv

witching hour

(Business World) see triple witching hour

23.5 wok...

A bowl-shaped pan used in Chinese cookery, especially for stir-fry dishes.

Etymology: A direct borrowing from Cantonese.

History and Usage: The wok (and the Chinese cooking for which it is used) enjoyed a vogue in the Western world in the late seventies and early eighties and by the end of the eighties the wok had come to be regarded as a standard piece of kitchen equipment.

Fry the peanuts in the oil in a large saucepan or wok for 4-5 minutes, until lightly browned.

pack' was libellous to wolves.

Economist 29 Apr. 1989, p. 31

womanist noun (People and Society)

In the US: a Black feminist or feminist of colour. Also, a woman who prefers the company and culture of women, but who is committed to the wholeness of the entire people.

Etymology: Formed by adding the suffix -ist (as in feminist) to woman, on the model of a Black English word womanish meaning 'wilful, grown up (or trying to be too soon)', as in an

expression which Black mothers might use to their daughters: 'You acting womanish.' Womanist had been independently formed several hundred years ago in the sense 'a womanizer', but this usage did not catch on.

History and Usage: The word womanist was coined by the American Black woman writer Alice Walker as a deliberate attempt to challenge the racist implications of the feminist movement,

which found it necessary to speak of a separate category of 'Black feminism' and which thereby excluded Black women from

mainstream feminism. Some of the followers of womanism see in it a more general challenge to the content of radical White

feminism as well, offering a less aggressive and more positive view of womanhood as contributing to the community as a whole. As Alice Walker has written in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983):

Women who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people

(and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males. My own term for such women would be 'womanist'...It would have to be a word that affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world.

Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.

Alice Walker In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983), p. xii

A computer program which (like a virus) is designed to sabotage a computer or network of computers and can replicate itself without first being incorporated into another program (compare Trojan).

Etymology: So called because it operates like a parasitic worm in an animal host; it can worm its way into a network without first having to be copied into another program, breeds extra segments, and cannot easily be killed off.

History and Usage: The concept was invented by John Brunner in the science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider in 1975; his worm is the computing equivalent of a parasitic tapeworm, generating new segments for itself in all the machines of a network and therefore unstoppable. In the novel he uses the word worm interchangeably with tapeworm:

Am I right in thinking Hearing Aid is defended by a tapeworm?...If I'd had to tackle the job...I'd have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail.

It should just about have been possible to hang that sort of tail on a worm by 2005.

Although this type of program was beyond the capability of programmers at the time, a group of research scientists at the Rank Xerox laboratories in Palo Alto, California, attempted to develop a set of benign worm programs in the early eighties as a means of distributing computing operations across a number of different machines in a network, with the program finding spare computing capacity for itself and copying the necessary segment on to any machine that it was going to use. What really brought the worm into the news, though, was the worm which temporarily disabled more than three thousand computers at universities, businesses, and research establishments on the Internet network in the US in November 1988. Robert T. Morris, a research student at Cornell University, was later convicted of releasing the worm into the system.

One year after an Ivy League graduate student unleashed a computer 'worm' that brought a national scientific and

pronunciation of yah ('yes') into a noun. This mannerism had apparently been noted as long ago as 1887 in a student newspaper.

History and Usage: Despite the fact that yah has evidently been a well-known affected pronunciation of yes for some time, the word was not used to characterize a social type until the early eighties. By the early nineties most people probably associated loud and repetitive use of yah more with the brash executive or yuppie type than with the upper classes.

Pursuing my researches into the social make-up of the university [of St Andrews] with daughter and friends, I am reminded that the rich set are known as the Ya's, derived from their loud affirmations.

Sunday Telegraph 17 July 1983, p. 9

yappie noun (People and Society)

Either a young affluent parent or a young aspiring professional.

Etymology: A variation on the theme of yuppie, using the initial letters of Young Affluent Parent or Young Aspiring Professional for the'root'.

History and Usage: Like guppie, this is really a stunt word, jumping on the bandwagon of yuppie but in a rather ad hoc fashion. The word yappie has been used by journalists in a variety of contexts and meanings--including 'a talkative yuppie', 'a yuppie dog-owner', 'young Asian-American professional', and 'young athletic participant'--but it is the

two meanings given in the definition above that at present hold the majority. The word seems unlikely to survive in the language unless it becomes established in one of these two meanings.

The yappies are the creation of the Henley Centre, the research organisation which plots changes in social and spending trends. They are the young professional people who were possibly yuppies in the 1980s...When children come on the scene yappies spend most of their time in the more prosaic roles of 'parent' and 'provider'.