NEW DELHI: Call-centres and offshoring have gained entry into the English language along with Indian coinages 'airdash' and 'foreign-returned'.
The new edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary has acknowledged the growing influence of India's Information Technology worldwide by adding a number of new words.
The word 'offshoring', which has been newly included, even has a reference specifically about India.
'The offshoring of call-centre jobs to India', reads the reference for the entry, which means 'the practice of a company in one country arranging for people in another country to do work for it'.
The Indian coinages like 'airdash', 'chargesheet', 'prepone', 'undertrial' and 'foreign-returned' have also made the seventh edition of the dictionary, used by about 30 million people worldwide.
The example in the dictionary for 'airdash', which means 'to go somewhere by plane suddenly', reads 'The Minister airdashed to Delhi because of the parliamentary crisis'.
Also included on the list of new words are 'bird flu' (also 'avian flu' and 'chicken flu'), the disease that hit South East Asia two years ago and still poses a threat in countries like Vietnam.
Other new Indian words include 'kabbadi', 'ghat' and 'jungli' (wild, not educated).
"The learners of English are now exposed to languages from more different areas," says Ms Sally Wehmeier, chief editor of the seventh edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, first published by the famous lexicographer A S Hornby in 1948.
The dictionary has also done away with the hyphen in 'e-mail' to be spelled as 'email' and made 'Web site' one word, without a capital 'W'. It will now be 'the Web', but just 'website'. Also changing according to the times is the word 'Utopian' to 'utopian'. - UNI
