Star Wars: Jedi, Force, and Padawan All Get Added to the Oxford English Dictionary

For years, the Star Wars franchise has become a pretty significant fixture in our pop culture, and it looks like that’s manifesting in an interesting way. The Oxford English Dictionary recently published their “New Words List” for October of 2019, which highlights entries that are being added or edited in some form or fashion. The list reveals that several pieces of Star Wars vocabulary have officially made their way into the dictionary, including “Jedi”, “Force”, and “Padawan”.

The dictionary defines “Jedi” as “in the fictional universe of the Star Wars films: a member of an order of heroic, skilled warrior monks who are able to harness the mystical power of the Force.” Similarly, “Padawan” is defined as “an apprentice Jedi“, and “lightsabre” (the English spelling) is referred to as “a weapon resembling a sword, but having a destructive beam of light in place of a blade”.

Meanwhile, “Force” has been updated to reference the Star Wars universe, and is referred to as “a mystical universal energy field”. The definition for “mind trick” was also updated to link readers back to “Jedi”.

These additions to the dictionary come as the Star Wars franchise reaches an interesting zenith, with the franchise’s first live-action TV series The Mandalorian, as well as the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, are set to debut next month. And of course, December will bring along Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which is expected to bring a conclusion to the main nine-film narrative that fans know and love.

“J.J. [Abrams] had told me and then I read the script, and then it was sort of shifting.” franchise star Daisy Ridley said in an interview earlier this year. “The ending was always pretty similar, and then I was told there was a new, I guess, a slightly different beat added that I was told, which was awesome. Because it’s nice to be told a thing, and then you can experience it with the filmmaker. But also, we don’t always know how it’s going to turn out. We did the thing on this side of the camera, but we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. So I’m as excited to see it as everyone else.”

“Our movie was not just following what we had started [with The Force Awakens], it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else [with Star Wars: The Last Jedi]. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies,” Abrams shared in an interview back in April. “While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big-picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run, was an enormous challenge.”

What do you think of several Star Wars words joining the Oxford English Dictionary? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will be released on December 20th.