NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Whalen Wong.

And I'm Adrian Ma.

Here on the show, we love Econ Vocap.

You know, these are nerdy terms that aren't used much outside the Econ world.

So learning what they mean is like getting access to a kind of secret language that helps

us understand the economy better.

And sometimes, these specialized terms make the leap from academic circles into everyday

language.

That's when they get maybe the highest honor that a humble little vocab word can ever

hope to achieve.

They get added to the dictionary.

That is right.

Earlier this month, Miriam Webster added over 300 new words to the dictionary.

And we were pretty excited because a bunch of these words are Econ Vocab terms, terms

that we have talked about on the indicator before, like Metaverse.

Unbanked, shrink-flation, and supply chain.

There were some other business terms on the list too, one that I really liked is dumb

phone, you know, like a non-smart phone.

That's a business term.

Yeah.

To see on the show, we pull back the curtain on how words make it into the dictionary.

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