Twerking Competition 2015, Riga, Latvia

Twerking (/ˈtwɜːrkɪŋ/) is a type of dancing in which an individual, usually a female, dances to music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance. Though the term seems to be of uncertain origin with common assumptions suggesting it represents a contraction of "footwork" or a portmanteau of the words "twist" and "jerk", the Oxford Dictionaries blog says "the most likely theory is that it is an alteration of work, because that word has a history of being used in similar ways, with dancers being encouraged to "work it". The "t" could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch." There is evidence from ethnographic interviews in New Orleans that the term began as street language in New Orleans with the rise of the local hip hop music known as bounce. Since the late 1990s, twerking was associated with bounce music of Southern hip hop and was disseminated via mainstream hip hop videos and popular video-sharing sites since the mid-2000s. In 2013, twerk was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. According to Oxford dictionary, the word has been around for 20 years. The word was a runner-up in the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013.