Girlboss to girl math, what women-related neologisms really mean

Girlboss, girl math, and girl dinner: Exploring empowering neologisms for women in the evolving language landscape.

If you haven’t yet heard of girl math, or girl dinner, you probably aren’t spending enough time on social media. Girlboss, at least? Among the 690 new words added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in September 2023, is girlboss, a term used to describe an ambitious and successful woman (especially a businesswoman or entrepreneur). 

In use since 2014, the term was coined by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of an American fast-fashion retail site whose autobiography #Girlboss was a bestseller. Girlboss has been trending since, with and without the hashtag, especially among Gen Z, who uses it to denote a woman’s winning attitude. 

In 2023, TikToker Samantha Jane broke down her way of spending, explaining her logic in doing so and called it girl math. It went viral and is still trending with women sharing memes and videos of their spends on their timelines, often humorously. Girl math is the logic a woman applies to justifying an expensive or what may be considered a frivolous purchase. 

Many of these social media-driven neologisms are on women, coined by women, and used by women. So are they empowering or reinforcing the gender divide?  

Anagha Anand, a Class XII student of Rajagiri Public School in Kochi, sees these coinages as a way of reclaiming a very essential part of the self. “When you are a kid, you go through this whole phase where you are ‘not like other girls’. But eventually you realise that you are like other girls, and that is a wonderful thing. It is a whole shared experience to be able to be girl coded together,” she says.

Girl math, Anagha explains, is a way of acknowledging things that have been conventionally labelled “girly”. “It is not a bad thing and it is totally fine to like them (case in point, shopping and love for makeup), and as an idea, it is all about accepting oneself for who one really is and creating a sense of belonging. Self love only.” 

Girl dinner, another recently viral phrase, would seem just like self love, especially for women who have little ‘me time’. Coined by Olivia Maher, an American food and lifestyle content creator, girl dinner means a low-effort, hassle-free, comfort meal that a woman rustles up for herself, without having to worry about its nutritional content or having to feed others in the family. Though it has critics crying foul over the trend promoting unhealthy eating habits, women the world over have been posting pictures of easy, quick, non-cooked dinners with the hashtag.