To produce the new words, the Language Council looks at which words have either appeared for the first time, or have become much more common during the past year.
They mainly look at media texts and about a third of the new words usually find their way into the Swedish dictionaries eventually, while others disappear quite quickly.
- Some words really are day dragonflies.
We included fidget spinners on the new word list a few years ago.
It was almost dead even then, but since it was such a trendy thing for half the year, we still chose to include it, says Anders Svensson, editor-in-chief at Språktidningen.
- Whereas if you compile dictionaries or the Swedish Academy's glossary, then you have a much longer perspective.
The corona words are endangered
Corona dog, hybrid meeting and vaccine nationalism are some of the words that were on the new word list in 2021. And this year, the concept of "ghost flight" is included, i.e. airplanes that fly without passengers with the aim of maintaining times for departures and landings at airports.
- This is definitely a temporary problem now that the pandemic is over and we are traveling more and more.
Quite a few of those corona-related words are already, if not dead, endangered, says Anders Svensson.