We’re all familiar with text speak in one way or another, even if it’s just the basics of gr8, LOL and atm. But now there’s a new (ish) craze sweeping the nation, thanks to the predictive text function on mobile phones.

When you set your mobile to predictive text – often known as the T9 dictionary*– and type in a word, the first option it comes up with may be different to the one you actually want. For example, type in ‘cool’ and it comes up as ‘book’.

But it seems that teens – constantly striving to be misunderstood – are now using these alternatives instead of the actual words they represent. This is now so commonplace that, according to the Telegraph, the Oxford English Dictionary are considering entering ‘book’ into its dictionary, under the meaning ‘cool’.

Confused? You’re not alone. But while many will dismiss this craze as silly, David Crystal, a linguistics expert at Bangor University quoted in the Telegraph article, believes that ‘the language shows incredible ingenuity and a high degree of literacy on [the user’s] part’.

And he’s got a point. After all, the English language constantly adapts and changes. It embraces new words to describe new things, such as ‘internet’ and ‘petaFLOPS’ (a measure of computer processing speed). It borrows words from other languages such as ‘en route’ or ‘rendezvous’ and was a melting pot of German, Latin and other languages, in the first place.

Even punctuation had to change to fit in with the modern, online world. It’s much easier for people to recognise an em dash (–) than a semi-colon when reading text on a screen, for example. And most newspapers these days have little problem starting a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ – something that would have been a huge ‘faux pas’ just a few years ago.

The evolution of English is nothing new. Shakespeare himself made up over 1,500 words for instances when no other would fit – something that has driven GCSE English students to distraction ever since.

So, while they’re getting their heads around Hamlet, maybe we should cut texting teenagers a bit of slack and accept the prevailing lingo of the day, gongu**.

Here’s some of our favourite textonyms – or T9onyms – to get you started:

**gongu = innit

book = cool

lips = kiss

poisoned = smirnoff

shot = pint

carnage = barmaid

eat = fat

nun = mum

*T9, which stands for ‘text on 9 keys’, is named after patented predictive text technology developed especially for use on mobile phones.