Online Dictionaries aren't just convenient, they give the people who run the dictionary sites a view into the zeitgeist in a way that was never possible when people looked up words in physical books. Lexicographers see data about what visitors are looking up, and naming words of the year based on search spikes or overall increases in search volume for particular words has become a tradition. This year, it’s pretty clear that political news and events were driving searches.
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2016, Surreal
Merriam Webster’s word of the year for 2016 was surreal, which the lexicographers said spiked after the terror attack in Brussels in March, again in July related to a coup attempt in Turkey and a terror attack in Nice, and finally again in November after the US presidential election.
Their definition of surreal is “Marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.”
Highlighting the influence of US politics, other top Merriam-Webster searches in 2016 were bigly, which is a word (but is a rarely used word), deplorable, and feckless, which Mike Pence used in a vice-presidential debate.
Dictionary.com Word of the Year, 2016: Xenophobia
Dictionary.com also cited search spikes caused by global political events as the reason for choosing its word of the year: xenophobia (which their dictionary defines as “fear or hatred of foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers”).
They report they saw a 938% increase in lookups for the word xenophobia the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union and a smaller spike immediately after the US presidential election. The lexicographers noted that they already had their eye on xenophobia before 2016, because it also had a huge spike in 2015 after attacks on foreigners in South Africa.
Other words they highlighted as showing large search spikes in 2016 were hate crime and populism.
Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year, 2016: Post-Truth
The Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2016 was post-truth, which they define as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to Oxford Dictionaries, they saw large increases in searches for post-truth “in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US.” (See the chart.) Some of their other candidates included political terms such as Brexiteer, alt-right, and woke, and non-political words such as chatbot and (one of my favorites that you may remember me talking about in previous years) adulting.
Collins Dictionary Word of the Year, 2016: Brexit
Collins Dictionary chose Brexit as its word of the year. They first saw people using Brexit in 2013, but saw a 3,400% increase in searches in 2016. (I’m sure Math Dude would tell you that if you start from a small number, as you would for a new word, a 3,400% increase may not be that big in raw numbers, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the search volume made it a worthy choice.)
Other candidates on the Collins list included Trumpism, mic drop, snowflake generation, Uberization (referring to the ride hailing company Uber and their business plan), and JOMO (which means the joy of missing out and is presumably a reaction to FOMO, which is the fear of missing out).
They also included the Danish word hygge (pronounced much like hookah, but with more of a G than a K sound in the middle), which means “the practice of creating cosy and congenial environments that promote emotional wellbeing.” Oxford Dictionaries actually included hygge too and their definition notes that it’s regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture. It’s hard for me to pronounce, but it’s a nice word, and there don’t seem to be many of them this year.
Those are the major dictionary words of the year based at least loosely on search volume, but just a few days ago, the American Dialect Society also chose its words of the year, which are based on votes at the group’s annual meeting, and you can see how it all unfolded by searching Twitter for the woty16 hashtag because multiple people were live tweeting from the meeting.
The American Dialect Society Word of the Year, 2016: Dumpster Fire
The American Dialect Society word of the year was dumpster fire, to mean “an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation,” and I always find the American Dialect Society choices to be the most interesting because they have categories and they even pick an emoji of the year. For example, the emoji of the year was the flame, and then they also included the emoji representation of dumpster fire as part of the dumpster fire choice. It’s a combination of a waste basket emoji and the flame emoji, presumably because there is no dumpster emoji.
And interesting aside about the word dumpster is that it was originally a trademarked term and was capitalized. A company called Dempster Brothers trademarked their Dempster-Dumpster in the 1930s, but it has became such a generally used word that it’s now common to see it lowercase. AP style is lowercase, but the New York Times appears to continue to capitalize dumpster.
You may be wondering how two words—dumpster fire—can be the word of the year, which seems like it should be a single word, but the American Dialect Society press release explained that the “Word of the year is interpreted in its broader sense as ‘vocabulary item’—not just words but phrases.” I presume that the Collins Dictionary used the same rationale for snowflake generation and mic drop.
Their digital word of the year was the @ symbol used as a verb, as in “don’t @ me,” woke was their slang word of the year, and gaslight was their most useful word of the year.
I’ve actually been meaning to write about the verb gaslight for a couple of months because I kept seeing it on Twitter and could not figure out where it came from, and it turns out the story is interesting. Gas lighting is form of psychological manipulation where an abuser makes people doubt their sanity by denying that something that happened really happened. For example, a boyfriend might promise to pick up his girlfriend from work, not show up, and then swear that he never made the promise and that she’s the ditzy one. The gaslighter will do things like this over and over with such brazen confidence that the girlfriend really does start to wonder if it’s her. But why would this be called gas lighting?
It turns out it comes from a 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie called Gaslight, which was based on a popular play called Angel Street when it ran on Broadway, in which a manipulative husband who has murdered their wealthy upstairs neighbor causes the gas lamps in the house to dim while he repeatedly is searching for the missing woman’s jewels, and then he tries to convince his wife that it isn’t happening—that she isn’t seeing the lamps dim before her very eyes and that she is going insane.
So that was our wonderful year in words according to lexicographers and linguists, and all of you who search for words in online dictionaries. I’m going to try to take deep breaths and focus on hyyge.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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