50 Fun Facts About Word of the Year

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name Word of the Year for 2015, the year it topped global usage charts?

Face with Tears of Joy made up a fifth of all emoji sent in Britain that year, so Oxford's judges picked a pictograph over every actual word.

Which word, first seen in a 2002 message on an Australian web forum, was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2013?

Selfie surfaced when an Australian shared a photo of the lip he had split in a drunken fall at a friend's 21st birthday. Eleven years later the word was everywhere.

Which word did Dictionary.com name Word of the Year for 2020 after searches for it leapt 13,575 percent in one day?

Pandemic was also Merriam-Webster's choice for 2020, where lookups spiked 115,806 percent on the day the World Health Organization applied the term to Covid-19.

Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name its 2019 Word of the Year after lookups rose 313 percent in twelve months?

They won after Merriam-Webster added a new sense in September 2019: a pronoun for one person whose gender identity is nonbinary.

Which three-letter word did Oxford Languages name Word of the Year for 2021 after its use rose 72-fold?

Vax won because it bred so many spin-offs, from vax cards and vax sites to being fully vaxxed. Oxford's editors called it a rare word until that year.

Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year, brain rot, was first recorded in which American classic published in 1854?

Walden used the phrase because Henry David Thoreau was mocking his society's taste for simple ideas over complex ones, 170 years before it described endless scrolling.

Which word was Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2021 after a NASA Mars rover landing sent lookups soaring?

Perseverance was looked up more than 243,000 times in 2021, and 30,487 of those searches came in the week after the rover of that name touched down.

Which country's language society began naming a Word of the Year in 1971, long before any English-language version?

Germany's Wort des Jahres has been chosen every year since 1977, while the oldest English-language vote, by American linguists, only began for 1990.

Which word, coined by Stephen Colbert on his show's first episode, was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2006?

Truthiness, the sense that something is true whatever the facts say, won an online poll by five to one. It was the first time Merriam-Webster let visitors vote.

Which slang phrase became Oxford's Word of the Year for 2022, the first time the public chose the winner by vote?

Goblin mode, meaning unapologetically lazy and self-indulgent behaviour, was picked after more than 300,000 people voted. It had first appeared on Twitter back in 2009.

Which two-word phrase did Oxford name Word of the Year for 2019 after it became 100 times more common?

Climate emergency became the most written-about kind of emergency in 2019, with over three times the usage of the runner-up, health.

Which adjective was Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2019, a pick it tied to Toy Story 4's spork Forky?

Existential summed up a year spent grappling with survival, Dictionary.com said: of the planet, of loved ones and of ways of life.

Which word won Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2019 by drawing the most likes on its Instagram account?

Upcycling, making new objects out of old or waste material, beat every other Word of the Day that Cambridge shared with its followers in 2019.

Which word did Collins Dictionary choose as Word of the Year for 2020, calling it the condition people most dreaded?

Lockdown meant, as Collins put it, a state of national stasis in which almost everything that makes up normal public life is suspended.

Which word did Cambridge Dictionary name Word of the Year for 2020 after a search spike in the week of 18 March?

Quarantine had gained a new sense, Cambridge's editors found: a general period when people may not leave home or travel freely.

Which adjective completes the title of Oxford's 2020 report, issued instead of one Word of the Year: Words of an … Year?

Unprecedented was itself one of 2020's spiking terms, and Oxford said the twelve months could not be neatly accommodated in a single choice.

Which word was both Macquarie Dictionary's Committee's Choice for 2020 and the American Dialect Society's Digital Word?

Doomscrolling, obsessively scanning feeds for bad headlines, took 81 percent of the American linguists' vote in the digital category.

Which word did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year for 2021 after lookups climbed 601 percent over 2020?

Vaccine needed a rewritten dictionary entry that May, because mRNA shots trigger an immune response in a way the old definition did not cover.

Which word was Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2021, the first winner added to the site that same year?

Allyship means working for the inclusion of a marginalised group without belonging to it, and Dictionary.com had only just written its entry.

Which abbreviation was Collins's Word of the Year for 2021, when a Beeple digital artwork sold for $69 million?

NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital certificate of ownership that Collins described as a convergence of money and the internet.

Which word did the American Dialect Society vote Word of the Year for 2021, recalling the January 6 Capitol attack?

Insurrection, a violent attempt to take control of the government, was the label many felt fitted best, though coup and riot were also used at the time.

Which blended word won both the committee's and the people's vote as Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2021?

Strollout mocked the slow pace of Australia's Covid-19 jab programme, a rare case of the public and the expert judges agreeing.

Which character became Japan's Kanji of the Year for the fourth time in 2021, each win falling in a Summer Olympic year?

Gold marked Japan's record 27 golds at the Tokyo Games, and it edged out the character for ring by only 118 votes out of more than 220,000.

Japan's Kanji of the Year for 2019 was the first character in the name of which newly begun imperial era?

Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, the day Naruhito succeeded his father as emperor, and its opening character topped that December's public ballot.

At which Kyoto temple does a priest paint Japan's Kanji of the Year with a giant brush each December?

Kiyomizu-dera hosts the ceremony after a nationwide public ballot, a tradition the Japan Kanji Proficiency Society began in 1995.

Which slang word, popularised by streamer Kai Cenat, did Oxford name Word of the Year for 2023?

Rizz comes from the middle of charisma, Oxford's editors say, an unusual way to build a word, and its use peaked after actor Tom Holland said he had none.

Which hyphenated term was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2016, a year of shock referendum and election results?

Post-truth describes times when objective facts shape public opinion less than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Which Oxford UK Word of the Year for 2012 was coined by writers of the BBC satire The Thick of It?

Omnishambles was first hurled at a hapless minister by spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in 2009, then reached the House of Commons as a jibe at the 2012 Budget.

Which word, coined in the 1960s by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2017?

Youthquake first described sudden shifts in fashion and music, then rose five-fold in 2017 as young voters shook up Britain's general election.

Which word, taken from the title of a 1944 Ingrid Bergman thriller, was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2022?

Gaslighting recalls a plot in which a husband lies to persuade his wife she is mentally ill, while the house lamps dim each time he secretly searches upstairs.

Which gamers' cheer, spelled with two zeros in place of letters, was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007?

W00t won an online poll, and Merriam-Webster's president praised a term that blends whimsy and new technology. It had spread through online role-playing games since 1996.

Which word won the American Dialect Society's vote for 2000 after dominating coverage of the Florida recount?

Chad, the scrap punched out of a paper ballot, took 43 votes to just 6 for runner-up muggle. Teletype operators had used the term for 50 years.

Which verb, inspired by an astronomers' ruling that year, was the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2006?

Plutoed means demoted or devalued, as happened when astronomers ruled that the ninth planet no longer counted as one.

Which two-word phrase beat 'woke' in a run-off to become the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2016?

Dumpster fire, meaning an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation, was also entered in the ballot as a pair of emoji: a bin and a flame.

Which musical term did the American Dialect Society vote Word of the Twentieth Century at a meeting in January 2000?

Jazz began as West Coast slang around 1912, and it took 50 votes to about 12 for runner-up DNA at the session that crowned 'web' the term of the 1990s.

Which company name, used as a verb, did the American Dialect Society vote Word of the Decade for 2000 to 2009?

Google, meaning to search the internet, had already been voted the linguists' most useful term of 2002.

Which word did Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society both name Word of the Year for 2025?

Slop means low-quality digital content churned out in bulk by artificial intelligence, and the linguists also made it their digital term of 2025.

Which Charli XCX album title did Collins Dictionary name its Word of the Year for 2024?

Brat was Collins's pick that October, and Forbes later ranked the summer named after the album among 2024's biggest pop moments.

Which word did Collins Dictionary name Word of the Year for 2022, a year of war, inflation and political upheaval?

Permacrisis means an extended period of instability, a mood Collins summed up as lurching from one shock to the next and dreading what comes after.

Which phrase from a 2016 tweet by cartoonist Ben Ward became Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2017?

Milkshake duck names a person who wins online fame for something charming, only to be found to have a distasteful history.

Which word did Collins name Word of the Year for 2016 after its use jumped 3,400 percent in twelve months?

Brexit was coined in a May 2012 blog entry by Peter Wilding, four years before the referendum made it unavoidable.

Which two-word phrase was Word of the Year for 2017 at both Collins Dictionary and the American Dialect Society?

Fake news had two meanings by 2017, the linguists noted: falsehoods dressed up as real reporting, and real reporting that is claimed to be untrue.

Which term did Oxford name Word of the Year for 2025 after three days of public voting?

Rage bait is online content made to provoke anger and so drive engagement, and more than 30,000 people voted before Oxford's experts confirmed it.

Which hyphenated verb did Collins name Word of the Year for 2015 after its use rose about 200 percent in a year?

Binge-watch won, Collins said, thanks to box sets, streaming services, tortuous cliff-hangers and another rainy British summer.

Which verb was Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2023, the same year the site added its AI sense?

Hallucinate, in its new sense, describes a chatbot presenting false information as fact, and Cambridge Dictionary chose the same verb that year.

Which snack did the Australian National Dictionary Centre name its Word of the Year for 2016?

Democracy sausage is the sausage in bread sold at fundraising stalls outside Australian polling places, often to raise money for the schools and churches hosting the vote.

Which coinage won the American Dialect Society's very first Word of the Year vote, held for 1990?

Bushlips, meaning insincere political rhetoric, won in December 1990, and the society marked that ballot's 30th anniversary by meeting online for the first time.

Which word, first recorded in a 1644 sermon, did The Economist name its Word of the Year for 2024?

Kakistocracy is built on the Greek for worst and means government by the worst or least qualified people.

Which Sarah Palin coinage did the New Oxford American Dictionary name its Word of the Year for 2010?

Refudiate blends refute and repudiate, and the dictionary's editors decided it stands alone with a general sense of 'reject'.

Which suffix, rather than a complete word, did Merriam-Webster name its Word of the Year for 2015?

The suffix -ism topped a 2015 list crowded with terms that end in it, with socialism in second place. It traces back to Ancient Greek.