Wordists find 18,000 new items a month coinages

IS YOUR achiever fever leading to analysis paralysis? Are you a fashionista, a waitress mom or an ego-surfer? Do you suffer from domophobia or air rage?

These are some of the new words discovered by the Oxford English dictionary reading programme in 1998 as part of their extensive trawl for new vocabulary, averaging more than 18,000 new words and meanings per month.

The programme monitors the new words to determine which are significant enough to require a place in dictionaries, said Peter Gilliver, chief general revision editor of the Oxford English dictionaries.

The words his team will consider include achiever fever (the reduction of life to an incessant round of work-related activity) and analysis paralysis (when decision-making ability is paralysed by overwhelming amounts of information).

Mr Gilliver's favourite is cybersquatter - someone who registers well- known company names as Internet addresses in order to sell them on for profit to the company involved. Other Internet-inspired words this year are ego-surfing (searching the Internet for occurrences of your own name) and cyberwidow (the unfortunate partner of a habitual Internet user).

Domophobia indicates severe hostility to the millennium dome whereas air rage and web rage also became common parlance this year, following the popularity of road rage. For those reluctant to go out and risk global distillation (pollution of the Arctic eco-system) it is more than likely that you will be subjected to irritainment (irritating but none the less compulsive viewing) on your television set.

Social groupings are also assessed such as fashionista, a devotee of the cutting edge of haute couture, or waitress mom, a US parent on low income which became a key demographic group in the 1998 mid-term elections.