Word of the Year
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50 free Word of the Year trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every winter, dictionary publishers and language societies look back over twelve months of headlines and searches and crown a single term that sums it all up. The choices are a time capsule: slang that went viral, technical jargon that suddenly mattered to everyone, and now and then a pick that is not really a word at all. This quiz covers the winners from Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Collins, Cambridge, Macquarie and the American Dialect Society, with extra attention on 2019, 2020 and 2021, when a health crisis rewrote everyday vocabulary. It also reaches back to earlier decades and across to Japan's Kanji of the Year, and asks who coined the winners, why editors chose them and how the selections are made. It suits word lovers, pub quiz hosts and teachers who want a ready-made language round. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing the story behind the word as well as the word itself.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name Word of the Year for 2015, the year it topped global usage charts?
Face with Tears of Joy
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.
Q 02Which word, first seen in a 2002 message on an Australian web forum, was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2013?
Selfie
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.
Q 03Which word did Dictionary.com name Word of the Year for 2020 after searches for it leapt 13,575 percent in one day?
Pandemic
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.
Q 04Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name its 2019 Word of the Year after lookups rose 313 percent in twelve months?
They
They won after Merriam-Webster added a new sense in September 2019: a pronoun for one person whose gender identity is nonbinary.
Q 05Which three-letter word did Oxford Languages name Word of the Year for 2021 after its use rose 72-fold?
Vax
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.
Q 06Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year, brain rot, was first recorded in which American classic published in 1854?
Walden
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.
Q 07Which word was Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2021 after a NASA Mars rover landing sent lookups soaring?
Perseverance
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.
Q 08Which country's language society began naming a Word of the Year in 1971, long before any English-language version?
Germany
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.
Q 09Which word, coined by Stephen Colbert on his show's first episode, was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2006?
Truthiness
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.
Q 10Which slang phrase became Oxford's Word of the Year for 2022, the first time the public chose the winner by vote?
Goblin mode
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.
Q 11Which two-word phrase did Oxford name Word of the Year for 2019 after it became 100 times more common?
Climate emergency
Climate emergency became the most written-about kind of emergency in 2019, with over three times the usage of the runner-up, health.
Q 12Which adjective was Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2019, a pick it tied to Toy Story 4's spork Forky?
Existential
Existential summed up a year spent grappling with survival, Dictionary.com said: of the planet, of loved ones and of ways of life.
Q 13Which word won Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2019 by drawing the most likes on its Instagram account?
Upcycling
Q 21Which word did the American Dialect Society vote Word of the Year for 2021, recalling the January 6 Capitol attack?
Insurrection
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.
Q 22Which blended word won both the committee's and the people's vote as Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2021?
Strollout
Strollout mocked the slow pace of Australia's Covid-19 jab programme, a rare case of the public and the expert judges agreeing.
Q 23Which character became Japan's Kanji of the Year for the fourth time in 2021, each win falling in a Summer Olympic year?
Gold
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.
Q 14Which word did Collins Dictionary choose as Word of the Year for 2020, calling it the condition people most dreaded?
Lockdown
Lockdown meant, as Collins put it, a state of national stasis in which almost everything that makes up normal public life is suspended.
Q 15Which word did Cambridge Dictionary name Word of the Year for 2020 after a search spike in the week of 18 March?
Quarantine
Quarantine had gained a new sense, Cambridge's editors found: a general period when people may not leave home or travel freely.
Q 16Which adjective completes the title of Oxford's 2020 report, issued instead of one Word of the Year: Words of an … Year?
Unprecedented
Unprecedented was itself one of 2020's spiking terms, and Oxford said the twelve months could not be neatly accommodated in a single choice.
Q 17Which word was both Macquarie Dictionary's Committee's Choice for 2020 and the American Dialect Society's Digital Word?
Doomscrolling
Doomscrolling, obsessively scanning feeds for bad headlines, took 81 percent of the American linguists' vote in the digital category.
Q 18Which word did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year for 2021 after lookups climbed 601 percent over 2020?
Vaccine
Vaccine needed a rewritten dictionary entry that May, because mRNA shots trigger an immune response in a way the old definition did not cover.
Q 19Which word was Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2021, the first winner added to the site that same year?
Allyship
Allyship means working for the inclusion of a marginalised group without belonging to it, and Dictionary.com had only just written its entry.
Q 20Which abbreviation was Collins's Word of the Year for 2021, when a Beeple digital artwork sold for $69 million?
NFT
NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital certificate of ownership that Collins described as a convergence of money and the internet.
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.
Q 24Japan's Kanji of the Year for 2019 was the first character in the name of which newly begun imperial era?
Reiwa
Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, the day Naruhito succeeded his father as emperor, and its opening character topped that December's public ballot.
Q 25At which Kyoto temple does a priest paint Japan's Kanji of the Year with a giant brush each December?
Kiyomizu-dera
Kiyomizu-dera hosts the ceremony after a nationwide public ballot, a tradition the Japan Kanji Proficiency Society began in 1995.
Q 26Which slang word, popularised by streamer Kai Cenat, did Oxford name Word of the Year for 2023?
Rizz
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.
Q 27Which hyphenated term was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2016, a year of shock referendum and election results?
Post-truth
Post-truth describes times when objective facts shape public opinion less than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
Q 28Which Oxford UK Word of the Year for 2012 was coined by writers of the BBC satire The Thick of It?
Omnishambles
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.
Q 29Which word, coined in the 1960s by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2017?
Youthquake
Youthquake first described sudden shifts in fashion and music, then rose five-fold in 2017 as young voters shook up Britain's general election.
Q 30Which word, taken from the title of a 1944 Ingrid Bergman thriller, was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2022?
Gaslighting
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.