Hater (n)

Means: A negative person

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.