Hundreds of words have been added to the dictionary this year. Which ones will last?

Last month, a woman was bitten by a royal horse. Maybe you saw the video, the tourist posing beside a mounted King’s guard, despite the sign warning people that horses may kick or bite. Chomp! The woman yowls. Staggers. Drops to her haunches. Go online and you’ll see YouTube offers the whole “face journey”, from grin to grimace to pout to scowl.

Face journey is just one of 700 intakes, gathered by the Oxford English Dictionary’s midyear census. To be clear, most additions are overdue tweaks (like blotchiness or snackable), or oversights such as hair gel and cement mixer. Even test pattern, engineered for TV screens in the early ’60s, has somehow taken 60 years to enter the database, a heartbeat compared with chess set and brass instrument.

Dwelling on the new, however, we meet old words with fresh nuances. Among those were cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction dealing more with Devonshire teas than Liverpool kisses, and flash sale, a bargain window on a micro-scale. Bed-rotting – the decadent practice of lingering under the doona all day – is a staycation option linked to your internest (or internet-nest): that hygge retreat we might pursue with cocoa and wifi.

Glampsite (an upscale overnighter) and wildscape are two crisp admissions. Though both pale against recent fusions submitted by Wordplay readers, including vivivore (Catherine Simpson’s label for an animal that eats another while its prey is still wriggling), or Cate Osborn’s exquisite eggcorn.

To remind you, an eggcorn is a defensible malapropism, like cold slaw or old-timer’s disease. Inspired by the phenomenon, Cate wrote: “There is something so touching about these little poetic mistakes. I wonder if they’re not entirely accidental but, rather, unconscious communications of some sort. I was reminded of my granddaughter asking me to sing her a ‘loverby’ while she was with us on a sleepover.”

Returning to the Oxford’s raw recruits, we find a lot of language serves as historic souvenirs. Consider such arrivals as spy balloon, Barbiecore, Brexiteer and Remoaner, plus this eco-push for aquamation (where a lye solution dissolves the deceased), also known as resomation, a flameless cremation, or the extra catchy alkaline hydrolysis.

Misclick makes sense. Ick factor is overdue. While cuffing season (the colder months deemed desirable to seek romance) feels outright weird. As a stem, shit has been busy, gaining shit-talk and shit-talker, though my hot tip for stayer is enshittification, a coinage of Canadian-UK critic Cory Doctorow. This German-like label applies to the slow downslide of social media, and plenty of other one-time assets.

Weather, for instance, where soaring mercury has helped to fashion heat dome, global boiling and megadrought. But let’s finish on the upbeat. A word like glimmer, say, being the optimistic antonym of trigger, anointed by the Macquarie this year. It’s in league with protopia, defined as “progression towards a better society, one small step at a time”.