These different spellings for “electronic sports” reflect the rapid takeup of video games as a competitive sport around the world. The growth of esports can be traced from South Korea, with the founding of the Korean e-Sports Association in 2000 ...

While we might recognise the verbal elements that make up the recently coined word holistorexia its meaning is not immediately obvious. It’s a combination of holist(ic), as in holistic medicine, and (an)orexia which literally means “lack of desire or appetite”. ...

Amid concerns about other people’s mental health, this four-letter initialism/acronym for “Are you OK?” came alive in 2021. It was coined some years before by an Australian non-profit suicide prevention organisation (in 2009) which holds an annual R U OK? ...

The social media app TikTok is responsible for countless trends that involve people doing, or saying, or showing things in short videos recorded on their phones. One of the more recent trends to have taken off is the dance move ...

At first sight this could be a slogan for crunchier fish and chips from the deep freeze, something which food companies could definitely improve on. In fact, it’s a highly sophisticated technique for editing the genes of plants, animals and ...

Words and phrases are quite often borrowed from other languages to express a concept for which there is no existing term – think of schadenfreude or déjà vu in English (from German and French respectively). Less frequently, a completely new ...

This year my partner and my brother both left academia. They are part of a nation-wide changing of the guard at most universities in Australia and many overseas. Over 17,000 Australian university jobs disappeared in 2020, Universities Australia estimated. It ...

The Social Research Centre has just released the 2021 Graduate Outcomes Survey – Longitudinal (GOS-L) report, which shows the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant lockdowns have not had the devastating effect that was predicted.  The GOS-L is an online survey that ...

The - cide suffix provides us with homicide, the most general word for killing another person, as well as specific types of killing that identify the person killed: fratricide (one’s brother or sister), patricide (one’s father), regicide (the king), suicide ...

The University of Sydney has confirmed that thousands of casual workers who applied to convert from casual to permanent employment were rejected at a time a union representative has called a “tragic irony”: R U OK? Day. Last Thursday, only ...