Welcome to the lexicon of luvvies

PARIS Hilton started the latest wave by carrying around her "peekapoo" in her handbag, Sienna Miller followed suit by wearing stylish black "treggings", and Russell Brand joined the club with his love of "glamping".

The globalised age is seeing more than 350 million words springing into use every year, a rate researchers say is far higher than any previous generation has seen.

According to the world's biggest database of more than two billion English words, everybody from celebrities to bloggers are coining new ways to describe the 21st century.

The words cover a wide range of topics but are often centred on popular culture and include terms from "globesity", to describe the worldwide epidemic that counts John Prescott among its sufferers, to Kerry Katona's apparent portrayal of a "slummy mummy".

To help people keep up with their own language, leading dictionary writer Jeremy Butterfield has devised a guide to the evolution of 21st-century English.

Using the world's most powerful English language database, the Oxford Corpus, the lexicographer has dug out the latest words and phrases being used all over the world.

The Corpus uses any text published after 2000, from medical textbooks to online chat rooms, to collect billions of 21st-century words to show how language is being used and to highlight new words and terms. It is used to select a list of new words to add to the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The new terms being coined in the 21st century range from the genre of food and drink, with "tapafication" being the trend to replace a traditional main course with small appetisers, to lifestyle words such as "manscaping", which describes male cosmetic hair removal.

Butterfield, the editor of the Oxford A-Z Of English Usage, 2007, said: "A lot of new words are puns on old words, like 'floordrobe', where you take two different words and stick them together, in this case to describe the teenage habit of never putting clothes away.

"Historically it's not the usual way of creating new language, but it's incredibly creative and the words are often quite funny. They are words that are being invented by bloggers and writers who want to add a bit of sparkle to their copy and want to express something that hasn't been said before."

He added that the internet was making people more creative than ever with their language. "Writing online means people can circulate a new word incredibly quickly, and people can start using it within seconds," he said.

As well as propelling the language, technology has also produced its own new terms, such as "doppelgoogler" which is someone with the same name as you, whose existence you discover by Googling yourself.

A "cyberchondriac" is someone who thinks they have got every disease they find on the internet, and "fauxtography" describes the art of doctoring pictures.

Dr Patrick Honeybone, a lecturer in linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, said the effusion of new words showed people's creativity.

He said: "The language should be free to change in the way that language users want it to change. I don't think it should be policed. I would be interested to see whether these words made it into a dictionary. It's difficult to tell which words will make it, because they have to be widely used. Language is very democratic in that way."

But Dr Jonathan Hope, head of English studies at the University of Strathclyde, said: "I'm not entirely convinced there are so many new words being created.

The English language has not changed much in hundreds of years. It will not change that quickly."

Damp Squid, The English Language Laid Bare, by Jeremy Butterfield, is published by Oxford University Press and is available to buy from Wednesday, October 29, priced 9.99.