"YOH! I love your makarapa and vuvuzela - eish, it's sharp sharp!"

Though many South Africans will understand this sentence, for those who do not, help is at hand.

The new Oxford South African Concise Dictionary defines these words in its latest edition, compiled by the dictionary's unit for South African English at Rhodes University.

• yoh (also yho or yo): informal; expressing surprise, disbelief, shock or admiration.

• makarapa (noun) (also makaraba): 1. an elaborately decorated hard hat or miner's helmet, worn as a headdress by supporters of a soccer or other sports team. 2 historical; a mineworker or migrant labourer. ORIGIN from Sesotho sa leboa, "men who work in the cities".

• vuvuzela (noun) a long straight plastic horn, chiefly used by spectators at soccer matches.

• eish (also aish or heish), used to express a range of emotions, including surprise, annoyance and pain. ORIGIN: 1990s, from tsotsitaal.

• sharp sharp (also sharp): informal. 1 expressing approval, acceptance or agreement. 2 used as a greeting at meeting or parting.

Phillip Louw, of Oxford University Press Southern Africa, is the managing editor of the dictionary, which hit the shelves last month and took more than three years to compile.

Deciding which words to include was difficult.

"Ayoba was one of the words we debated about for some time. It can be used in so many different ways - as a greeting or to describe something. What we had to determine was whether it had penetrated the language beyond the MTN marketing campaign," he said.

"We also have to determine whether a word will be here in the next few years, and we have to ensure that the word has been used in three to four different publications and by several authors."

The work was done with the help of the dictionary unit for South African English at Rhodes University, which has a large database of newspapers, books articles and literature at the university's library.

Cape Talk personality John Maytham lauded the latest edition as "excellent, highly valuable . perfectly pitched for the modern user".

Louw's favourite word this year is "definitely" makarapa. But his all-time favourite?

"There is nothing as lekker as the word 'lekker'."