Internet makes 'kubi' mark on Chinese dictionary

'Did you get this mengliao? Shanzhai iPhone is out? It is kubi.'

Roughly translated: 'Did you know this hot news? The knock-off iPhone is on the market. It is very impressive.'

These fashionable Chinese terms, commonly used in online forums, have made it into the language - or at least into the new Oxford Chinese-English English-Chinese dictionary.

Said to be the largest single-volume dictionary of its kind, it contains about 670,000 words and phrases with pronunciation in Putonghua. Sixty editors from Oxford University Press and its China partner, the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, worked on it for six years before its release this week.

On the Chinese-English side, the choice of new words is based on data from a sophisticated databank system developed by a unit under the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of the City University of Hong Kong, the publisher says.

There were no political considerations in the decisions on which words would be included, OUP says. Decisions were based on whether a word was used frequently in different mediums, such as in online forums and in newspapers, and in daily conservations. For example, the word fenqing is included. Translated into English as 'angry young people', this word has made its way outside the Web to mean 'extremely nationalistic young Chinese'.