Vuvuzela buzzes into the pages of Oxford

The World Cup in South Africa, climate change, the credit crunch and technology have all left their mark on the way we talk, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English reveals, as the latest crop of new words to be added to its pages is published on Wednesday.

The World Cup in South Africa, climate change, the credit crunch and technology have all left their mark on the way we talk, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English reveals, as the latest crop of new words to be added to its pages is published on Wednesday.

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Football fans will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that the vuvuzela has blared its way into the dictionary's pages. By being ushered into the dictionary, which is based on how language is really used, the metre-long plastic horn has cemented its immortality as well as its ubiquity.

The new words appear in the third edition of the single volume dictionary, which was first published in 1998.

Buzzwords of this economically squeezed epoch also figure such as toxic debt.

The virtual world, as ever, proffers plenty of its own jargon. The new edition has finally cottoned on to social media and microblogging. Slightly less quotidian is the phrase "dictionary attack", which describes an attempt to gain illicit access to a computer system by using a huge set of words to generate potential passwords.