'Pharaoh', 'Coca-Cola', 'queer' and other words that have made it into the dictionary

Every year, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) announces the new words added to its dictionary , a selection carefully presented to the public. However, many other additions arrive without much fanfare or official announcement. This is the case with terms like "faraona" (2020), "cocacola" (coca-cola), or "queer" (2024), quietly included but precisely tracked by philologist Gelsys M. García in her book "Las 2,000 nuevas palabras del español" (The 2,000 New Words in Spanish) (Oberon Publishing).

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A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), born in Cuba and with a PhD from the Complutense University of Madrid, García has identified nearly 2,000 new words introduced between 2014 and 2024. Of these, only 910 were recognized as new by the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy of Spanish Language) and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), although all were available for public consultation in the digital version of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (DLE). García's meticulous—albeit handcrafted—method consisted of comparing the 91,111 entries in the 2014 printed dictionary (the latest paper edition) with successive digital updates, using the DLE's "Empieza por..." (Starts with...) tool, which allows words to be filtered by their initial letter, albeit in blocks of up to 200 terms per query.

“To paraphrase a well-known popular saying: maybe not all that are there are there, but all that are there are there,” García states with reasonable certainty about the reliability of his system. Even so, the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy) recommended that he wait for the official publication of the twenty-fourth edition of the dictionary, scheduled for the end of 2026.

In her research, García came across words that surprised, amused, or fascinated her, such as Afro-descendant, colacao, cuñadismo, demasié, discman, draculino, kiki (or quiqui), largoplacismo, mangú, transhumanidad, and volleyball player. But one of the ones that caught her attention the most was faraona, added in the midst of the pandemic in 2020.

“I understand that all the attention was focused on the coronavirus—a word that was also incorporated at the time—but omitting this other word was a notable oversight, at least from a cultural perspective,” he opines. Contrary to what one might think, “faraona” was not included as a tribute to the legendary Spanish artist Lola Flores—known by that nickname—but rather as a feminine form of “pharaoh,” referring to “each of the ancient kings of Egypt prior to the conquest of this country by the Persians.”

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In 2024, the foreign word " queer" was also incorporated into the dictionary, in italics, which is defined as someone who " has a gender identity or sexual orientation that does not correspond to traditional categories ." Another surprise was discovering that Coca-Cola—also accepted as Coca-Cola—is already included in the DLE (Spanish Legal Dictionary of Spanish Language). In the author's opinion, the absence of this term in official advertisements could be due to the fact that its inclusion would represent a huge amount of free promotion for the brand. Furthermore, she points out a typo: in the etymology section, the dictionary mentions the registered trademark Coca-Cola, but omits the hyphen that is part of its official spelling, an "obvious oversight" that contrasts with the correct use of the hyphenated form by academics in other contexts, such as social media. And, as García—who has also published Illustrated Orthography: A Book to Improve Writing—insists, "even language academics make mistakes." In his book, he offers examples such as travelín (a film term that designates a camera movement), which in the 2014 print edition was incorrectly accented as a grave word when it should have had an accent because it was proparoxytone: trávelin.

“Behind the dictionary, there are many details and intricacies that we rarely know,” the researcher concludes. “These examples demonstrate how human this process is.”

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