Tag Archives: Merriam-Webster

The Associated Press reports: In an age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence rose and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.” Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights throughout …

The Associated Press reports: “Gaslighting” — mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Lookups for the word on merriam-webster.com increased 1,740% in 2022 over the year before. But something else happened. There wasn’t a single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year. The …

Law & Crime reports: A California man has pleaded guilty to threatening a dictionary company and a university president. Though Jeremy David Hanson, 34, only pleaded to charges regarding Merriam-Webster and the University of North Texas, his plea agreement details an extensive history of making politically infused — and usually transphobic or homophobic — threats against people and companies. I …

From the Justice Department: A California man was arrested on Tuesday, April 20, 2022 and charged in federal court in Springfield, Mass. in connection with making threats against Merriam-Webster. Jeremy David Hanson, 34, of Rossmoor, Calif., was charged by criminal complaint with one count of interstate communication of threats to commit violence. Hanson was released on conditions following an initial …

The Associated Press reports: With an expanded definition to reflect the times, Merriam-Webster has declared an omnipresent truth as its 2021 word of the year: vaccine. “This was a word that was extremely high in our data every single day in 2021,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, said. “It really represents two different stories. One is the science story, which is …

The Washington Post reports: It’s clear that the pandemic has changed dining as we know it, sometimes in potentially permanent ways. Now, so many of the catchphrases we got to know while eating in the covid era are making their way into the firmament of the lexicon. Ever order a burger from a “ghost kitchen” for “curbside delivery”? Merriam-Webster is …

Axios reports: Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster, told AP that after the World Health Organization declared on March 11 the COVID-19 outbreak to be a pandemic, searches for the word on Merriam-Webster.com were 115,806% higher than for the same period in 2019. Runners up for word of the year based on lookup surges related to the pandemic were …

ABC News reports: The language mavens at Merriam-Webster have declared the personal pronoun “they” their word of the year based on a 313 percent increase in look-ups on the company’s search site, Merriam-Webster.com, this year when compared with 2018. “They” got an early start last January with the rise of model Oslo Grace on top fashion runways. The Northern Californian …

Via press release from Merriam-Webster: Our Word of the Year for 2018 is justice. It was a top lookup throughout the year at Merriam-Webster.com, with the entry being consulted 74% more than in 2017. The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice. …

From Merriam-Webster: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2017 is feminism. The word was a top lookup throughout the year, with several spikes that corresponded to various news reports and events. The general rise in lookups tells us that many people are interested in this word; specific spikes give us insight into some of the reasons why. Feminism spiked following …

The A.V. Club reports: America still has much to learn from drag queens—gender being a social construct, for example, or the perils of hog body—but there’s one aspect of drag culture that has long since moved into the mainstream, and that’s the slang. Chief among these linguistic gifts is a new, many-layered meaning for the word “shade,” a concept that …

From Merriam-Webster: Fact (“a piece of information presented as having objective reality”) spiked dramatically on January 22nd, following an exchange between Chuck Todd and Kellyanne Conway on NBC’s Meet the Press that was fraught with epistemological tension. “You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary is giving alternative facts to that,” Conway shot back. “Wait a minute, …

Late last month Merriam-Webster issued a tweet basically begging people to look up anything but “fascism” – which was then leading their look-ups list for 2016. Today we get the final “winner.” The Independent reports: Was 2016 a dream or a nightmare? Try something in between: “surreal,” which is US dictionary Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Meaning “marked by the …

Somehow the right wing Washington Examiner manages not to mention Trump in their story about this tweet, which was flagged for us by JMG reader John. The good people at Merriam-Webster practically begged users to search for any word other than “fascism” so the dictionary company could avoid making it the word of 2016. In a tweet posted Tuesday afternoon, …

Via the Associated Press: A nation, a workplace, an ethnicity, a passion, an outsized personality. The people who comprise these things, who fawn or rail against them, are behind Merriam-Webster’s 2014 word of the year: culture. The word joins Oxford Dictionaries’ “vape,” a darling of the e-cigarette movement, and “exposure,” declared the year’s winner at Dictionary.com during a time of …

Merriam-Webster has issued a list of the year’s top ten most searched for definitions on their website. The first two words are tied. 1. socialism and capitalism 2. touché 3. bigot 4. marriage 5. democracy 6. professionalism 7. globalization 8. malarkey 9. schadenfreude 10. meme I’m guessing we had something to do with #3 & #4.

Here are a few of the words and terms added to the 2012 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary by its editor Peter Sokolowski: F-bomb, sexting, man cave, earworm, energy drink, flexitarian, mash-up, e-reader, craft beer, and shovel-ready. A couple of existing words have had new definitions added: toxic (in a political sense) and underwater (regarding home mortgages.) Flexitarian, which describes …

A California school district has pulled all the dictionaries from its libraries after a parent complained that a student was able to look up the definition of “oral sex.” School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. The dictionaries were initially purchased a …

It turns out that the wingnuts are a little behind the curve with all this screaming about Merriam-Webster updating the definition of marriage. According to the company, they made the change in 2003. Actually, it’s kind of mind-blowing that nobody on either side has picked up on that in six years. Yesterday Merriam-Webster responded to all the nasty emails coming …

Well kids, we have done it. We have literally redefined marriage. And I say “literally” in the literal sense of the word. Check out the new definition of marriage according to Merriam-Webster.Of course, we’d rather see Section 1 of that definition as only one line saying: “Marriage: the state of being united to another adult in a consensual or contractual …