(CNN) – You’ve seen it hundreds of times in your social media feeds. A never-ending GIF of a dumpster, on fire, in reference to some ongoing, seemingly chronic calamity: a sport team’s awful season, a tech firm’s catastrophic product launch, a presidential candidate’s chaotic campaign.
Now, you can use the term “dumpster fire” with renewed authority because Merriam-Webster added it — along with 850 other words and definitions — to its dictionary. Once reserved for use by sports radio hosts and social media hipsters, it now can emit from the lips and fingertips of the hip and unhip alike. Indeed, an entity as esteemed as the American Dialect Society deemed the phrase its word of the year for 2016.
The new official definition of dumpster fire is “an utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence.” That’s how the phrase has been used since it first flickered into public consciousness about a decade ago. Merriam-Webster says its first known use occurred in 2008.
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Dumpster fire (noun): "An utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence," as the Merriam-Webster dictionary now defines it https://t.co/TtgBsqcWfL pic.twitter.com/8K1rmV3Yig
— CNN (@CNN) March 7, 2018
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