Catch up on the lingo, babycino

They are the new buzzwords changing the nature of officespeak.

Whether you are striving for a new word to slate your job, your colleagues or even someone who annoyed you in the café down the road, your options are now almost endless.

Experts today said that the internet is changing modern language by allowing new words to be spread around the world almost as soon as they are coined.

They highlighted websites like WordSpy.com and UrbanDictionary.com, which have become cult reading in many offices.

The sites provide an up-to-the-minute guide to language, from "hasbian" (a woman who was once a lesbian but has since embarked on relationships with men) to "frienemy" (a friend who also behaves like an enemy).

The websites show how American slang can relate to London's trendier areas, like Camden, or NW3. For example, UrbanDictionary's definition of the word "babycino" - a small cup of frothy milk ordered for the baby while mother has a coffee - reads: "For the designer-clad babies of pretentious NW3 types who are so arrogant they don't even bother to make eye-contact with the bartender."

If keeping up with the new lingo makes you hot under the collar, watch out for your "switz" - the sweat from your armpits showing through your shirt.

Jonathon Green, author of Slang Down The Ages, a history of the English variety, said: "It used to take years for new words to emerge into commonly-used language.

"But nowadays that is hugely accelerated because of the kind of world-encompassing media we have at the moment. And that is driven by the internet more than anything."

Mr Green added: "Slang is easily the best example of the kind of language which is developing fastest because of the internet.

"If you look at the slang used by hippies in the Sixties and Seventies, it was language that had been created 30 or more years previously in parts of black America and then crossed the Atlantic.

"Nowadays it takes no more than weeks, sometimes much less, for it to come over."