Humblebrag! Out of Station is now Oxford English—pass the nihari

4 min readUpdated: Jul 8, 2026 05:52 PM IST

Of 900 new entries to the Oxford English Dictionary this quarter, 13 are from South Asia. (Generated using AI)

‘Yeah nah’, not to ‘humblebrag’ but the Oxford English Dictionary has added a clutch of words from South Asia, which some will agree have made it tastefully ‘blingy’. It has also made an effort to clear its proverbial ‘floordrobe’, a bulwark against ‘enshittification,’ and reviewed older entries from the Indian subcontinent. So, next time your teacher snaps at you for using the Indianism ‘out of station,’ refer her to the OED, and tell her just as ‘au contraire’ is no longer just French, the phrase is also now proper English.

Of the 13 entries from South Asia, some like nihari and alpana, are borrowed from the many languages and cultures of the region, while others are English words that have been bastardised much like ‘out of station’ (“away from one’s usual location”) from outstation, and are largely unknown in the rest of the world.

Australia (15) Canada (6) Scotland (9) South Asia (10) World (13)

Slang built on wit, understatement, and a healthy disregard for taking things too seriously.

AUOED

Donkey vote

Originally a bonus vote for property owners (historical); now a lazy, sequential ballot vote.

AUOED

Branch stacking

Recruiting fake members to rig internal party votes.

AUOED

Flannie

A flannel shirt.

AUOED

Scungies

Old, worn-out clothes (dated); also swim briefs or underwear.

AUOED

Curly one

A tricky question or situation.

AUOED

Flog

Once an overly studious person; now a contemptible person.

AUOED

Checkout chick

A female supermarket cashier.

AUOED

Dishlicker

A racing greyhound.

AUOED

Grey nomad

A retiree who travels the country by camper van.

AUOED

Love job

An unpaid favour or task done out of goodwill.

AUOED

Snot block

A vanilla slice pastry.

AUOED

Kafoops

A placeholder name for someone whose name you've forgotten.

AUOED

Doover

A thingamajig, whatchamacallit.

AUOED

Horse doovers

A jokey phonetic spelling of "hors d'oeuvres."

AUOED

Yeah nah

A vague agreement-slash-disagreement — "yes, but…"

Curling culture, Indigenous-language influence, and everyday practicality.

CAOED

Elbows up

Being ready to defend oneself or fight back.

CAOED

Cashspiel

A curling tournament with a cash prize.

CAOED

Grunt

A stewed-fruit dessert topped with dough.

CAOED

Kitty-corner

Diagonally opposite.

CAOED

Point form

Bullet-point list format.

CAOED

Kokum

Grandmother, from Cree.

Rich, textured dialect words — some tender, some blunt.

SCOED

Take the crow road

To die, or be near death.

SCOED

Chippy sauce

A condiment served in fish-and-chip shops.

SCOED

Rowie

A flat, flaky bread roll from Aberdeenshire.

SCOED

Toorie

A round woollen or cloth cap with a bobble; also the bobble itself.

SCOED

Gowp

Of the heart or blood, to pulse rapidly; of a wound, to throb painfully.

SCOED

Loup

An older term for the heart beating or blood pulsating.

SCOED

Scaffie

Shabby, scruffy.

SCOED

Scrunted

Stunted or shrivelled (of a plant); short in stature (of a person).

SCOED

Stowed / stowed out

Crowded, packed full.

Loan words from Urdu, Bengali, Persian, and Punjabi — chiefly from Pakistan and Bangladesh English.

SAOED

Nazim

From Urdu and Persian, ultimately Arabic for "one who arranges." Named a Mughal provincial governor; since 2000, the elected head of a union or village council in Pakistan.

SAOED

Chapkan

Borrowed into Pakistani English from Urdu and Persian, probably via a Turkic root. A long, close-fitting coat buttoned at the front, worn especially in North India and Pakistan.

SAOED

Nihari

From Panjabi nihārī ("breakfast"), via Persian. A dish of meat, especially beef and mutton, slow-cooked in a spicy stew, now especially associated with Pakistan.

SAOED

Affectee

A person affected or harmed by a particular action, course of events, or set of circumstances (chiefly Pakistani English).

SAOED

Public call office

A public payphone (Indian and Pakistani English).

SAOED

Alpana

A stylized, geometric design painted in rice-flour pigments on a floor, used to decorate for Bengali holy days and festivals.

SAOED

Shutki

Dried fish used in Bengali cooking.

SAOED

Upazila

One of the areas that a district in Bangladesh is divided into for administrative purposes.

SAOED

Karahi

A bowl-shaped cooking pot with two handles used in South Asian cuisine; also a tomato-based curry cooked in one.

SAOED

Out of station

Once described ships out of a designated area; now used in South Asian, East African, and West African English for a person away from their usual location.

Words that belong to no single country anymore — internet culture and modern life made them universal.

WOOED

Fiending

An intense craving.

WOOED

Blingy

Shiny or flashy with jewels.

WOOED

Floordrobe

A pile of clothes on the floor, standing in for a wardrobe.

WOOED

Long game

A long-term strategy.

WOOED

Life hack

A clever shortcut or tip.

WOOED

Humblebrag

Bragging disguised as modesty.

WOOED

Enshittification

The gradual quality decline of online platforms or products.

WOOED

Jerry-rig

A hastily improvised fix.

WOOED

Bucket of bolts

An old, rundown vehicle.

WOOED

Au contraire

"On the contrary."

WOOED

Folksonomy

A user-generated tagging or classification system.

WOOED

Joggering

Busking, or street performing.

WOOED

Four-legged friend

An affectionate term for an animal companion.

Food and cooking: Three of the words incorporated from South Asia have to do with food and cooking. This includes the dish nihari (red meat slow-cooked in a spicy stew) and shutki (a Bengali dried fish). The karahi, “a bowl-shaped cooking pot with two handles,” which might be used to prepare the said dishes has also been included.

Dress: Two traditional robes, usually worn by men, have also found mention. They are are the chapan, a long loose open robe worn as an overcoat, which does not have a collar, and chapkan, a “long, close-fitting coat buttoned at the front.”

Administration From Bangladesh, the OED takes upazila, a district sub-division, and Nazim comes from the Mughal era, referring to the governor of a province who was responsible for military and judicial affairs.

Picked up from Pakistan, ‘affectee’ has been floating around since at least 1939. It defines “a person affected or harmed as a consequence of a particular action, course of events, set of circumstances, etc.” An example in a sentence would be: The landslide affectees were paid a compensation of Rs 50,000.

Then there is a public call office, the full form of the once ubiquitous PCO, a public payphone booth that anybody who grew up in India and Pakistan before mobile phones will remember.

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Art: Borrowed from Bengali folk art comes the word alpana, a “geometric design” painted on the floor on an auspicious occasion. The paint is created using rice flour and water.

Other “Englishes”

Not just South Asia, the OED also legitimised words from Australia, Canada and popular culture, such as ‘yeah nah’ a alang popular among Australians and New Zealanders, used as either an acknowledgement, to suggest one is not sure about something or an emphatic no, ‘elbows up’, a term that comes from Canadian ice hockey, but was co-opted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during election to indicate his aggressively defensive stance towards US tariffs, and humblebrag (an self-deprecating statement made to draw attention to an achievement), floordrobe (a heap of clothes on the floor), life hack, long game, folksonomy (tagging system in fan forums), and finally at last, the French word au contraire was declared English.

These updates validate Chinese-American author R F Kuang’s assertion in her 2022 novel Babel that English–the global lingua franca–was a “Frankenstein vernacular” stitched together with loanwords from around the world. The cache from India and the larger South Asian sub-continent famously included words such as pakka, bungalow, loot, pajamas, juggernaut and karma, and subsequent reviews have further enriched the language, ensuring that people from around the world, be it Dhaka, Toronto, Sydney, Manipur, Scotland, and even parts of the ever-evolving internet can actually understand each other, and not descend to actual babel.

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