Merriam-Webster officially added the words "selfie," "hashtag," and "catfish" to the latest digital edition of its dictionary.

In a press release published on its website, Merriam-Webster said these terms, along with about 150 others, will be featured in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 2014.

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The list of new words includes terms with pop culture references that people coined while using technology and social media.

Peter Sokolowski, the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, said that the new terms like tweep, social networking, catfish, selfie, unfriend, hashtag, crowdfunding, fangirl, big data, and gamification prove that social media has a huge impact on the spoken word. 

Though a lot of people would contest that the word "catfish" has already been a part of their diets and vocabulary for a long time, Merriam-Webster has given a new meaning to the world. Catfish can now refer to an individual who creates a fraudulent personal profile on a social networking site for illegal purposes.

Catfish became a famous word recently because of a documentary film and a subsequent reality show on MTV that stars Nev Schulman. It was also commonly used during the time when the Manti Te-o scandal broke out in 2013.   

Schulman said that he never imagined that the word catfish will be a phenomenon. He also said that he and the rest of the production crew of his show feel honored that Merriam-Webster is adding the word as a new entry in the dictionary, since it proved that what they had experienced in the film are shared by a lot of people in different parts of the world.

Several culinary words are also included in the new list, like turducken, pho, and poutine. Another new term is "freegan", which refers to an activist who search for free food in restaurant garbage receptacles to reduce consumption of available resources.