Online dictionaries have chosen the words that best reflect our collective mood in 2022. Permacrisis is a new word while goblin mode first appeared on social media in 2009. Gaslighting dates back about eight decades.

Anton Chekov was an acclaimed Russian playwright and short-story author. He was also famous for the writing concept of “Chekov’s Gun.”  Jane K. Cleland, mystery author and writing teacher, explained it as the writing principle that everything mentioned in your story must serve a purpose.

Dashiell Hammett’s seminal detective novel, “The Maltese Falcon,” opens with the mysterious Miss Wonderly hiring private eye Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer, to follow a man who eloped with her sister. It’s a classic red herring. Readers of mysteries, crime fiction, and suspense novels love red herrings, but where did the term originate?

Most fiction writers have probably written a MacGuffin without knowing it. The term, popularized by the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, refers to something that drives the plot of a story.

A romance writer cocky enough to trademark the word “cocky” wanted to stop other writers from using the word in book titles. She failed. In a case that serves as an important lesson for authors, the U.S. District Court for Southern New York ruled in favor of the Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America (RWA) in asserting the principle that nobody should own exclusive rights to use a common word in book and series titles.

The global pandemic forced schools and students to switch completely or partly to digital learning. The question remains whether the practice should continue after the pandemic. Is viewing or listening to content just as good as reading the printed word? A new research says no.

The current political climate has compelled Merriam-Webster dictionary to add a new entry under racism. Other new words recently added to online dictionaries include colorism, denialism, deepfake, and microtarget.

Language is a living thing, constantly changing with the times. The COVID-19 outbreak, which began in late 2019 in China, has added new words and terms to our vocabulary as quickly as the virus is spreading across the world.

Every year, the people behind popular online dictionaries choose a word or expression that best reflects our collective mood in the past 12 months. Their choices are based largely on the number of lookups. These are some of the words that appeared in most online searches this year: they, climate emergency, and existential.

Hear, hear—don’t write “here, here” if you’re referring to the phrase expressing approval. Don’t take my word for it, check out the dictionary. The expression, which goes back to the 17th century, is short for “hear this, hear this.”