2016, Summed Up in a Word
It’s not easy to sum up the past year in a single word, even if you stick to one language.
Take, for example, the competing “word of the year” offerings of various online English-language dictionaries. Merriam-Webster “surreal” based on spikes in lookups of the word at different points over the year, including the terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the coup attempt in Turkey, and the U.S. presidential election. Dictionary.com’s , picked to “embody a major theme resonating deeply in the cultural consciousness,” was “xenophobia,” a term that saw similar surges in lookups amid persistent “fear of the other.” Cambridge Dictionary’s” to its website during the past year was “paranoid,” a word that “suggests perhaps a feeling that the institutions that have kept us safe can no longer be trusted, that the world feels more uncertain than it did a year ago.” Oxford Dictionary “post-truth”—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”—based in part on its increasing frequency of use in 2016.
