IT MADE its mark on the World Cup, now it’s made its mark on the English language.

The vuvuzela, the giant plastic horn which provided the soundtrack to this summer's football, has been included in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, published today.

The battle over climate change has given us carbon capture and storage – the process of trapping and storing carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels – and geo-engineering – manipulation of environmental processes in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.

Recent financial woes introduced toxic debt to the language – debt which has a high risk of default – and quantitative easing – the introduction of new cash into the money supply by a central bank.

Cyberspace produced its share – social media – websites and applications used for social networking; microblogging – the posting of short entries on a blog; and dictionary attack – an attempt to hack into a computer system by using a very large set of words to generate potential passwords.

Other terms to make it in for the first time are staycation – a holiday spent in one’s home country, and national treasure – someone or something regarded as emblematic of a nation’s heritage.

In all, there are more than 2,000 new items in the third edition of the dictionary.