Ever since the American Dialect Society selected a Word of the Year at its conference in 1990, over half a dozen English dictionaries have anointed an annual word or phrase that’s meant to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the prior year.
In 2003, the publisher of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary began bestowing a crown. On Dec. 9, 2024, it selected “polarization” as its word of the year, which joins a list of 2024 winners from other dictionaries that include “brat,” “manifest,” “demure,” “brain rot” and “enshittification.”
The terms that are honored are selected in a variety of ways. For example, this year the editors of the Oxford Dictionaries allowed the public to cast votes for their favorite from a short list of candidates. Brain rot emerged victorious.
Other publishers rely on the acumen of their editors, augmented by measures of popularity such as the number of online searches for a particular term.
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