The Oxford English Dictionary has announced the latest batch of words and phrases deemed worthy of etymological conservation. From the encyclopedia’s just-released 2011 edition, you’ll see cream crackered, wag and tinfoil hat, as well as internet-era initialisms like LOL and OMG.

“They help to say more in media where there is a limit to a number of characters one may use in a single message,” says principal editor Graeme Diamond on the dictionary’s website. With the rise of concise text messages and 140-character tweets, sometimes less is more. But there’s more to OMG and LOL than just textbox frugality, though, explains Diamond.

“The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.”

Yes, quite. While you might consider LOL and OMG to be etymological artifacts from the mobile era or the internet age, the Oxford English Dictionary’s typically meticulous word-sleuthing found examples of both acronyms from 1960 and 1917, respectively. However, LOL’s use in the ’60s actually denoted “little old lady,” rather than “laugh out loud,” as we know it today.

Another web-worthy addition is the word heart, used as a verb, as in “I heart noodles.” It rose as a snarky parody of those ubiquitous “I ? NY” logos and “I ? My Shih-Tzu” shirts.

“This update may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper stickers,” says Diamond.

There’s also dot-bomb, used to describe web concepts that fizzle out and die. That one derives from the soaring, stock-market dot-com bubble of the late ’90s, and the eventual bubble burst in the early 2000s. Ego-surfing, another new addition, means searching for your own name online.

And let’s not forget rotoscoping, a form of animation where an artist paints or pixels over real-life footage, most notable in the film A Scanner Darkly and retro Apple II game Prince of Persia.

Or hentai, a type of raunchy Japanese animation that you definitely shouldn’t search for while at work. Or ever, really.

Photo: Liz West/Flickr