Merriam-Webster Adds Crypto Words to its Dictionary

Here’s another indicator of the rising cultural adoption of crypto. The oldest and arguably most prominent dictionary in the U.S., Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, has now added several crypto-related words to its lexicon.

The two most significant additions are “altcoin” and “metaverse”. Altcoins are defined as belonging to a group of about 20,000 cryptos that aren’t Bitcoin, i.e. all other coins on the market. And metaverse is a virtual environment where individual “virtual realities” are joined.

In addition, Merriam-Webster has added financial terms closely related to crypto. They include “unbanked” and “underbanked”, which denotes not having money in a bank or access to banking services, respectively. Another added word is “shrinkflation”, which happens when a unit is sold at the same price, while its volume is being reduced.