Miley Cyrus may have helped get 'twerk' into the dictionary. Well, she did.
Just 24 hours after Miley Cyrus' controversial gyrating on-stage at the VMA's 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary has added 'twerk' as a new verb into the English lexicon. Yes, really.
Oxford Dictionaries Online said the word - borrowed from hip-hop culture, though seemingly made famous by Cyrus in recent months - has become increasingly viable in the past 12 months.
Katherine Connor Martin from Oxford Dictionaries said the word 'twerk' had been known in US hip hop culture for around 20 years,
"By last year, it had generated enough currency to be added to our new words watch list, and by this spring, we had enough evidence of usage frequency in a breadth of sources to consider adding it to our dictionaries of current English," she said.
Trying her very hardest to avoid attributing the word to Miley's recent penchant for a twerk, Connor Martin added, "There are many theories about the origin of this word, and since it arose in oral use, we may never know the answer for sure.
The current public reaction to twerking is reminiscent in some ways of how the twisting craze was regarded in the early 1960s, when it was first popularised by Chubby Checker's song, The Twist," she added.
Other words making in their debut as part of the dictionary's quarterly update include "Omnishambles" - made famous on the BBC political satire The Thick of It and named word of the year in 2012 - and "selfie." The former means a situation which is shambolic from every conceivable angle, while the latter relates to taking a photo of oneself with a smart phone.
Cyrus's twerking performance at the MTV VMA's 2013 on Sunday - which saw her dancing suggestively with Robin Thicke - drew complaints from parenting pressure groups in the US.
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