What is the last word in English? It is 'zyzzyva'

The quarterly update includes "post-truth", previously announced by the OED as its word of the year for 2016 following Britain's Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's presidential victory.

What is the last word in English? The word is zyzzyva. In its latest update, the Oxford English Dictionary identified more than 600 words, phrases and senses that have entered common parlance.

The words include "zyzzyva", a genus of tropical weevils native to South America. The word replaces zythum, an ancient Egyptian malt beer, as the OED's final entry.

Dictionary.com defines the word as, "any of various South American weevils of the genus Zyzzyva, often destructiveto plants."

The name was coined by the US entomologist Thomas Lincoln Casey, who described it in a 1922 work, the OED said. Zyzzyva owes much of its currency in English to its notoriety as the last entry in various dictionaries, the ranks of which now include the OED.

The quarterly update includes "post-truth", previously announced by the OED as its word of the year for 2016 following Britain's Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's presidential victory.

Brexit" itself also made into the dictionary last year, meeting the OED's criterion that a new word, phrase or sense of a word must have featured in a variety of printed sources over several years.

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