Subcontinent's 'Jugaad' finds place in Oxford Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is reinventing itself over the years to keep up with changing times and adding more words (slangs included!) to its corpus… and now the dictionary officially recognizes the word ‘Jugaad’ in its latest revision.

The dictionary has added over 1000 new words including 70 words from Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Hindi and Gujarati this September.

Jugaad has found its place in the popular dictionary as a noun. Previously it was incorporated as an adjective like ‘jugaad method, jugaad innovation…etc’.

Other words that have been recognized include Abba (father), Bhindi (vegetable), gosht (meat), nai (barber).

But in the latest revision, the Oxford has recognized the slang as noun and described it as: “a means involving the use of skill and imagination to find an easy solution to a problem or to fix or make something using cheap, basic items”.

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The OED publishes four updates a year in March, June, September, and December respectively.

The Oxford University Press keep tabs on all walks of life from sports to marketing to politics to education to gossip to social media to collect the words.

According to `Release notes: Indian English’ written by Danica Salazar, OED World English Editor, “Seventy words originating from Indian English have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in this latest update, alongside the 900 or so words already existing in the OED.”

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She writes, “Indian speech etiquette features a complex system of kinship terms and terms of address, in which age, gender, status, and family relationships are marked by a highly specific vocabulary with no direct equivalents in English.