Goodbye 2019: Top Dictionaries Choose Words of the Year

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.

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: They

Definition: Refers to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.

Merriam-Webster chose they because of the shifting use and meaning of the word. The traditional definition of they: “a pronoun referring to people, animals or things.” “Lookups for they increased by 313 percent in 2019 over the previous year,” wrote the editors.

Other words chosen by Merriam-Webster based on the number of lookups came straight out of presidential politics: quid pro quo, impeach, and exculpate (from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s comment, “The president was not exculpated for the acts he allegedly committed.”)

Oxford’s Term of the Year: Climate Emergency

Definition: A situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.

Climate emergency was one of the most prominently debated terms this year, according to an analysis of language data collected by Oxford dictionary. “Usage of the phrase climate emergency increased steeply over the course of 2019, and by September it was more than 100 times as common as it had been the previous year,” according to the editors of the dictionary.

Other words that made Oxford’s short list were all related: climate action, climate crisis, and climate denial.

Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year: Existential

Definition: Of or relating to existence.

The editors of dictionary.com chose existential because it encourages questions about what our purpose in life is in the face of challenges. “It captures a sense of grappling with the survival—literally and figuratively—of our planet, our loved ones, our ways of life,” they said.

 A close runner-up was nonbinary, an adjective, which means, “not consisting of, indicating, or involving two.” The word also means “relating to, or intended for, any gender.”

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