UPDATE: New York, Milan, Paris, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks

There are many more fashion weeks around the world – Dallas, Los Angeles, Bangalore, Jakarta, LG, Buenos Aires – as fashionistas continue to materialize globally. And fashion is what The Associated Press is talking about in the latest version of their stylebook. The 2012 version was released this week and it contains hundreds of terms and names associated with the world of fashion.

In fact there is now an entire section entitled Fashion Style Guidelines which currently totals 185 entries beginning with the Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaia to the 1940’s zoot suit. There are anoraks, babydolls, serapes, fascinators, dolmans; designers Coco, Versace, Wu, Reard, Rodarte and Dolce & Gabbana (and Tansa will correct you if you write Dolce and Gabbana, or Dolce and Gabana for that matter).

And ampersands aren’t the only punctuation marks we have to consider … which department stores have apostrophes (Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s) and which don’t (Barneys New York). Then there is the notable lack of diacritics in stark contrast to Webster’s first choices … so where have all the accents gone? Applique, boucle, soigne, passe, pret-a-porter … and more. These changes to the accent marks have now been incorporated in our main AP database.

Definitely not a spectator…

Then there are fabrics – ikat, spandex, organza, Lycra, tulle, nylon, Orlon … note the casing.  We have. And styles – tulip, cloche, sheath, shirtdress (no hyphen, no space). AP has covered the field well.

But all is not simply fashion this go-round (or for those of you in the UK, go-around). AP has also added many new terms to the Social Media Guidelines section. AP now lists, among others, scraping, mirroring, modified tweets, direct messages, the cloud. Moreover, more entries have been added to the Broadcast Guidelines chapter including sigouts, b-rolls, voicers, voice-overs, inq, outq, etc.

Finally, AP has revisited some old “favorites” like hopefully and pushup ~ push up (no longer push-up as a noun as we say goodbye to yet another hyphen).

Hurray! One hyphen down, thousands to go.