"Girl power" is more venerable than the Spice Girls and was discovered by a man, the full Oxford English Dictionary discloses today. It was first spotted in a less raunchy setting by the novelist Malcolm Lowry almost 50 years ago.

Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, described in a letter how he noticed a Roman Catholic church with a notice saying: "We want girl power for our convent."

The term, added as a new phrase in the English language to the OED website and defined as "opposed to man power", spread further in the early 1990s thanks to the briefly prominent feminist punk US "riot girl" movement. Finally, according to the entry, it became identified in the late 1990s "with the British all-female group the Spice Girls".

Riot girl, often spelt grrrl, also gets into the dictionary for the first time partly because the Guardian Women page wrote of the phenomenon last year. Grrrl has a separate entry as "a young woman perceived as strong or aggressive, especially in her attitude to men or in her expression of feminine independence and sexuality".

Guardian usage also helped get another word, karoshi, on to the website as a sign of the times.

Karoshi - originally Japanese but in growing international usage - is defined as meaning "death brought on by overwork or job-related exhaustion". Newspaper references cited in the OED call it "a lethal mix of apoplexy, high blood pressure and stress related to too many hours on the job". Its main victims are said to be middle managers in otherwise good health.

Other new entries include home shopping, power dressing, ecofeminism, the adjective high street - meaning popular or mainstream - the Afro-American hairstyle high-top fade, and comper, defined as "a person who habitually enters competitions to win as many prizes as possible".

So mammoth is the job of updating the 143-year-old dictionary that some existing entries like micturition, an older medical term and euphemism for urination, are being revised for the first time in a century.

But the 60m word subscription website, launched two years ago, means that terms which became common on human lips in the 1990s and early 2000s can be vetted and added every three months.