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Hot off the heels of 'brat' summer, the term coined by British singer Charli XCX has been named the Collins Word of the Year 2024. A spokesperson for Collins Dictionary says their lexicographers discussed the new meaning behind the word 'brat' before deciding on its published definition. Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00It's quite a big project. We start off looking at a huge amount of data that's generated from the
00:05Collins corpus, which is basically a giant database of words, and we monitor how often
00:11words are used, so in traditional media but also in social media, which led us
00:16to the use of BRAT and the change in definition around the word BRAT that we saw over the summer
00:23and sort of continuing through the year into this huge sort of uptick in usage. Yes, our
00:28lexicographers will have discussed that at length to come up with the new definition,
00:33so obviously we've got an understanding of what the word BRAT meant to most of us prior to this
00:39year, whereas now it's got this entirely new definition which is around the characterisation
00:44of a confident, sort of hedonistic attitude, as Charlie XCX says, somebody who gets a bit messy,
00:50and yeah, that was discussed by our lexicographers to come up with that new definition.

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