Simples! Aleksandr the Meerkat gives the dictionary his word

It's been a momentous week for Aleksandr the Meerkat. First, the fictional mammal released his autobiography ; now "simples!", his catchphrase from the comparethemarket.com advert, has made it into the Collins English Dictionary. A host of Twitter-related words have also been added, reflecting the rise and rise of the micro-blogging site. As well as "retweet", there is "tweet-out", a greeting sent to one's friends via Twitter, and " tweetheart", a person who uses Twitter who is much loved or admired by other users". Also making its dictionary debut is "hashtag", a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#), used to identify the topic under discussion. This year's political upheaval is also reflected in the new tome, with Con-Dem, Con-Lib and Lib-Con all making the cut. One that already sounds anachronistic is Cleggmania , alongside its cousin its cousin, Cleggstasy, both of which only seem to be referred to in the past tense in common parlance these days. One of Gordon Brown's darker days is marked with the inclusion of "bigotgate", describing the former prime minister's encounter with disillusioned Labour supporter Gillian Duffy in Rochdale in April. His successor as prime minister, David Cameron, contributes " broken society " – described by Collins as a perceived or apparent general decline in moral values. On a similar theme, "ghost estate" refers to a housing estate built during an economic boom but unfinished or unoccupied during a recession. In technology, Apple's iPad made a sufficient impact to be included in this year's dictionary; and in sport and leisure, the dance-fitness programme Zumba made the grade. The Glasgow-based dictionary compilers identified the new inclusions using a 2.5 billion-word database. Written material from websites, newspapers, magazines and books and spoken material from radio, TV and everyday conversations is fed into the database each month to help keep editors abreast of new language trends.