The phrase ‘beer o’clock’ is one of 270 newly created words which are set to be included in Collins Dictionary’s next edition.

Also new are the likes of  ‘buzzkiller’: something that prevents people from having fun, and ‘carborexic’ : someone obsessed with decreasing their carbon footprint.

Susan Butler, the editor of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, believes some of the new words introduced in Collins have been here for a while.

Ms Butler says that some of these words are not a surprise to us – things like ‘glamping’ and ‘beer o’clock’. ‘Beer o’clock’ might be something that Australian English has provided to UK English. But there’s also stuff that is obviously new; things like ‘ecotarian’ and ‘carborexic’ are words which are cropping up as part of the conversation about environmental issues.

For frequent users of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, the new additions to Collins are useful.

The Collins Dictionary has registered the new words with the help of their corpus data – a digital archive that tracks 2.5 billion words in thousands of online sources.

Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary also has a corpus data, and Ms Butler claims it has revolutionised how dictionaries are compiled.

She explains that before you had to read lots of books and newspapers and so on, which was very time consuming; dictionaries took years.