Usage: “Don’t listen to Steve, you’re great - he’s just a hater”
The launch of the new Oxford Dictionary of English is always exciting for the teacherly and word-obsessed, to see what new, exciting and occasionally ridiculous terms have been added to its ever-thickening word soup. And chief among the additions to the new one (out last week) is Yoof mainstay “hater”.
Popularised by US hip-hop culture (and sometimes annoyingly shortened to h8r in textspeak), it means a person who refuses to be happy for someone’s success, instead insisting on finding negatives at every turn (“So what if Laura got three As - didn’t get into Oxford, now, did she?”) It joins 1,999 other additions in the new tome, including “netbook”, “vuvuzela” and “interweb”. No, we’re not accepting the last one as a real word either.
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