You definitely know about Oxford Dictionaries as that dictionary that you were told to buy in the quest to learn the English language. Those words came from somewhere and it is thanks to human culture.
Well, we are in a different age right now, where Internet use has moved from being for a select few to a big chunk of our population and this has led to a few words cropping up and added to the dictionaries. Some of these words become so popular thanks to their use in social media for example and were thereby added to the Oxford dictionary.
It is 2016 and Oxford dictionaries decided to reveal their annual list of words they were considering to name the word of the year. Last year, they awarded an emoji as the word of the year and of course we were curious to see what they’ll award next this year. Collins dictionary published their list recently and it was slightly different from Oxford’s list.
This year’s winner was post-truth, which is defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Apparently its use has spiked over %2000 over the past one year thanks to Brexit and the US political landscape.
However, there were other words in contention to be named the word of the year and you might have seen them being used in your favourite social networks or publications.
- Adulting which is the word used to explain the behaviour of characteristically acting like an adult
- alt-right which refers to the grouping of extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints where online media is used to disseminate controversial content.
- Brexiteer which is the term given to a person who is in favour of Britain leaving the EU.
- Chatbot which are the various automated programs that are supposed to mimic human interaction. (Messenger bots or Telegram bots.)
- Coulrophobia which is the extreme fear of clown. (The US had a clown problem recently)
- Glass cliff which is a situation where a minority or a woman is able to ascend to a leadership position despite of the challenges.
- Woke which is used to show that a person is aware of the injustices in society. This has been used extensively to the point that Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey wore a t-shirt that bears the word.
