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10 Words of the Year and What They Tell Us About Our Times
Words of the year are a powerful tool to navigate the present
On Dec. 19, 1990, about 40 members of the American Dialect Society, an organization studying the English language in North America, elected bushlips (a term used to refer to hypocritical political rhetoric) as the word that best represented that year. It was the first English Word of the Year ever announced.
The tradition of choosing a word or expression that encompasses the zeitgeist of a particular year and dominates its public discourse was started in 1971 in Germany by the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache, a government-sponsored association dedicated to the German language.
In the early 2000s, many English dictionaries took up the tradition started by the American Dialect Society and began announcing their words of the year. In particular, Oxford Languages, a leading authority on the English language, looks for a word or expression “that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.”
Although the word(s) selected to represent a particular year haven’t always withstood the test of time, or moved into everyday vocabulary, judging this tradition as a pointless…
