Words of the Year, In and Out

A word-of-the-year bracket created by Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl. The poll’s original 64 words were chosen by Fogarty’s Mastodon followers and posted on LinkedIn and Mastodon; the eventual winner was “inflation.”

What was the word of the year for 2022? It depends on whom you ask and how you frame the question. Maybe your personal word of the year, after two years of pandemic restrictions, was vacation. Maybe you feel strongly about the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization; your word is abortion.

Your personal words of the year will probably remain private, but other words of the year make headlines and spark debate. Merriam-Webster, the US-based dictionary company, chose gaslighting as its word of the year for 2022. Wait — isn’t that an old word? According to UK-based Oxford Languages, which publishes the Oxford dictionaries, the word (or term) of the year was goblin mode. Never heard of it, you may protest. Dictionary.com chose woman: who needed to look that up? And according to the American Dialect Society, which has been picking words of the year since 1991, the word of the year was a suffix and combining form: -ussy. Huh?

Welcome to the wide world of WotY.

You may cheer or disagree; you may be puzzled by the sheer variety; you may protest that a selection is too obscure, too common, not new enough, or “not a word.” You may even find a word of the year — WotY, in the jargon — to be so distasteful that you’d like to see it “banished.” (We’ll get to word-banishment in a bit.)