The Oxford English Dictionary has formally added more than a dozen words long used across the Caribbean and Bermuda, the latest step in an ongoing effort to document varieties of English beyond Britain and North America.
The new entries are drawn predominantly from Trinidad and Tobago and include canboulay, douen, hornerman, jablesse, nana, nani, peanut punch, sugar cake, to get on, Trinbagonian and vex money, according to Caribbean Journal's review of the update. A single Bermudian entry, bimpert, meaning a foolish or stupid person, was also included.
Several of the words carry deep historical roots. Canboulay, first documented in 1871, refers to 19th-century Trinidadian festivities marking the 1834 emancipation of enslaved Africans, traditionally featuring drumming, chanting and stick-fighting; it derives from the French Creole term for burned sugar cane. Douen, recorded since 1897, names a figure from Trinidadian folklore, the spirit of an unbaptized child said to lure others into the forest with backward-pointing feet. Jablesse, rooted in Antillean Creole and French, describes a shape-shifting spirit that appears as a beautiful woman by night.
Other additions are more everyday: peanut punch, a spiced drink of peanuts, milk and sugar first recorded in 1960, and sugar cake, a coconut-and-sugar confection dating to 1844. Trinbagonian, denoting people from both Trinidad and Tobago, entered popular use in the 1970s and 1980s. Nana and nani, Hindi-derived terms for maternal grandparents reflecting the islands' Indian indentured labor history, were added alongside vex money, the cash some Caribbean women have long kept hidden for emergencies, a term also documented in Nigerian English.
Dictionary editors framed the additions as reflecting how migration, colonialism and cultural exchange have shaped Caribbean English over centuries, according to coverage of the release. The update follows previous rounds of Caribbean English additions to the dictionary in recent years, part of a broader push to catalog regional Englishes that have historically been underrepresented in reference works.