The Sixth edition of the Collins English Dictionary, priced £30.

TAKE a copy of the new Collins English Dictionary to bed for a spot of night-time reading (as you do) and you could be forgiven for thinking Noughties Britain really is living up to its name.

If new words creeping into a language are any guide to the state of a nation, we're all having a shagtastic time between the sheets and going on so many drunkathons we're all in need of sobriety coaches. Our music is getting louder, judging by the number of noiseniks around, but who said the new Millennium was going to be all PC? Sexism seems to be making a comeback, too, with bootylicious babes everywhere, and attractive young TV news presenters being dismissed as autocuties or anchorettes.

The English language, according to the Collins English Dictionary's editor-in-chief Jeremy Butterfield, is changing faster than it has ever done. Every day, about 50 new words are being coined. Not all of them are around long enough to become established. But many do - and 5,500 of them make their way into the pages of the sixth edition of the Collins dictionary.

Many of the new words come from our obsession with TV, celebrity and designer lifestyles. Reality TV has spawned the microcelebrity, while event television and car-crash TV are among the biggest ratings winners; and our obsession with health and beauty has reached startling heights, coining a host of new words such as Britneyfication, capsule wardrobes and chemical peeling.

But other areas of 21st Century life are also contributing to the explosion of new words. Science (biomarker), politics (push polling), business (targetitis, aggressive accountancy and flexecutives) and the military (mission creep) have all added to the English lexicon, while teenage inventiveness combined with the development of text-messaging has led to a veritable volcano of new 'words' such as CUL8R, IMNSHO and LOL.

So is the English language changing out of all recognition? Probably not, admits Jeremy. The vocabulary may be altering more quickly than ever before - but the underlying grammar and syntax remains essentially the same.

Many of the new words betray a transatlantic influence - helped by the internet, music and the success of cult teen American TV shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer (see panel). But British English is more than holding its own - and in fact, says Jeremy, there has been a renaissance in regional dialects in the last few years.

Collins has promoted this - by going out to dialect societies and other organisations and asking them to select regional words still in common use that they think should be in the dictionary.

"The dictionary has always included World English, words that come from the US, Australia and New Zealand, and we thought 'hang on a moment, let's look at the microcosm within British English that is so important,'" Jeremy says.

The result is a host of 'new' old dialect words that are making their way into the dictionary for the first time - and no region in the country is richer in these than the North of England.

Perhaps it's because until recently so many communities in the north were isolated; certainly, it is partly because of the historical uniqueness of the area, with its Nordic and Viking inheritance; and partly, perhaps, it is also because the smothering influence of London on local language is less marked up here. Whatever the reason, Jeremy says, northern dialects remain uniquely distinctive.

Londoners may all think we're dowly dummelheads up here, and it is true that sometimes we may be a bit antwackie, but when it comes to retaining the richness of our local language we're thraiping the rest of the country.

The Sixth edition of the Collins English Dictionary is out now, priced £30.

Updated: 09:18 Wednesday, July 30, 2003