Word of the Year: How It's Chosen and Past Winners

A Year Captured in One Word

Near the end of each year, major dictionary makers and language societies name a "Word of the Year" (often shortened to WOTY). The choice may be a single word, a phrase, or in one famous case even an emoji. The idea is simple: select an item of language that seems to sum up the events, arguments, anxieties, jokes, and habits of the previous twelve months.

What once interested mainly lexicographers and language watchers is now a recurring news story. The announcements are shared, praised, mocked, and argued over because they do more than label a year. They preserve a small record of what people were reading, asking about, repeating, and trying to understand. Viewed over time, the winners trace a compact history of language in motion: new coinages arrive, familiar terms shift, and public vocabulary bends toward the pressures of the moment.

The Groups Behind the Annual Picks

There is no single official Word of the Year. Several organizations make their own choices, often using different evidence and serving different audiences. Because of that, the winners can vary widely from one institution to another. The best-known WOTY programs include:

• American Dialect Society (ADS): The longest-running Word of the Year vote in the United States, held since 1990.
• Merriam-Webster: A leading American dictionary publisher that has made annual selections since 2003.
• Collins Dictionary: A British dictionary publisher that has selected a yearly word since 2013.
• Oxford University Press: Publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionaries, with selections dating to 2004.
• Macquarie Dictionary: Australia's national dictionary, choosing winners since 2006.
• Dictionary.com: A major online dictionary that began naming a Word of the Year in 2010.
• Cambridge Dictionary: Published by Cambridge University Press, with selections beginning in 2015.

Merriam-Webster's Lookup-Based Approach

Merriam-Webster relies heavily on user behavior. Its editors study lookup patterns on merriam-webster.com, a site that receives more than 100 million visitors each month. They look for terms that rose sharply in searches during the year, especially when those jumps were tied to news, politics, entertainment, public debate, or other widely shared moments.

A one-day burst of curiosity usually is not enough. The winning term is expected to show a large and meaningful rise in lookups, and the increase should connect to something bigger than random traffic. Editors also watch for words that keep drawing elevated interest across the year, even if they never produce one spectacular peak.

That method gives Merriam-Webster's choice a crowd-sourced feel. Rather than beginning with a committee's favorite candidate, the process starts with what readers actually searched for because they wanted a clearer definition. As a result, its winners often feel like terms people kept running into in headlines, speeches, posts, and conversations.

Oxford's Corpus-and-Editor Method

Oxford takes a blended approach. Its language experts examine large corpora—huge collections of real English usage—to spot words and expressions that are new, newly visible, or newly important. Editors monitor candidates during the year, build a shortlist, discuss the evidence, and then make a final selection.

Compared with Merriam-Webster, Oxford has shown more appetite for slang, fresh coinages, and boundary-pushing choices. In 2015, it named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji (😂) as its Word of the Year, which led many people to ask whether an emoji should count as a word. In 2016, Oxford selected "post-truth," a term that fit the political climate even though many readers had barely encountered it before the announcement. Such choices can be divisive, but they also help keep Oxford's annual pick in the public conversation.

How Other Language Authorities Pick Their Words

The American Dialect Society Vote

The ADS selection is both the oldest and one of the most language-focused versions of the tradition. It takes place at the society's annual January meeting, where linguists, lexicographers, and other language scholars vote live. ADS also recognizes category winners such as "Most Useful," "Most Creative," "Most Unnecessary," and "Most Likely to Succeed." Earlier selections include "tweet" (2009), "app" (2010), and singular "they" (2015), chosen before that use was broadly accepted as a gender-neutral pronoun.

Collins Dictionary's Corpus Pick

Collins uses evidence from its corpus of more than 20 billion words and pays close attention to terms whose usage climbed strongly during the year. Its winners often point to major social shifts or world events. Choices such as "lockdown" (2020) and "permacrisis" (2022) show Collins's preference for words that sharply identify the mood of a period.

Dictionary.com's Thematic Choice

Dictionary.com weighs search data alongside editorial interpretation. Its picks often speak to large social or political questions rather than only to raw lookup spikes. The site has frequently highlighted vocabulary connected with identity, justice, and public values, reflecting both its audience and the wider conversations happening around language.

Memorable Winners from Recent Years

Recent Word of the Year lists read almost like a compressed timeline of public concern and cultural change:

The patterns are easy to spot. Years shaped by emergency tend to produce emergency vocabulary, including "pandemic," "vaccine," and "lockdown." Periods of political stress bring terms such as "post-truth," "polarization," and "surreal" to the surface. Social and cultural change, meanwhile, pushes dictionaries to record words that may have sounded informal or niche only a short time earlier.

Why These Annual Picks Matter Culturally

Word of the Year announcements now matter far outside dictionary offices. News coverage introduces broad audiences to questions lexicographers think about all the time: what counts as a word, how definitions are written, how usage changes, and how new expressions become established. In that sense, the yearly announcements act as public lessons in etymology, usage, and word history.

The choices can also affect the way people talk. When a major dictionary labels a term Word of the Year, the word receives attention and a kind of public validation. A term that some readers dismissed as slang, jargon, or internet talk may suddenly look more established. That visibility can speed up adoption and soften arguments about whether the word is legitimate.

The response to these announcements also shows how much people care about language. The clicks, shares, jokes, and arguments around WOTY picks suggest a real public interest in meaning: where words come from, how they change, and what they reveal about the communities using them.

Where the Tradition Falls Short

Not everyone loves the Word of the Year ritual. Common criticisms include:

• Oversimplification: A whole year is too complicated to be captured fully by one word, so the basic premise can feel reductive.
• Selection bias: Each organization's method shapes the outcome. Merriam-Webster's lookup data favors words people felt unsure about, which may not match the year's most important vocabulary. Oxford's process depends more heavily on editorial judgment.
• Marketing over scholarship: Critics sometimes see WOTY as brand promotion for dictionary publishers rather than serious linguistic analysis.
• English-centrism: The most visible WOTY programs usually focus on English, leaving out changes happening across most of the world's languages.
• Recency bias: Events near the end of the year may loom larger simply because they are still fresh.

These objections are reasonable, but they have not made the tradition less popular. The disagreement may even be part of the value. Each argument over a winner becomes another public conversation about words, evidence, meaning, and cultural memory.

What the Annual Choices Say About Us

Seen together, Words of the Year sketch a portrait of recent life. They show people naming unfamiliar realities ("pandemic," "social distancing"), wrestling with social and political ideas ("gaslighting," "post-truth," "toxic"), and embracing playful or identity-based language ("rizz," "they"). The winners mark the places where ordinary vocabulary had to stretch.

The tradition also makes clear that language is always changing. It responds to fear, invention, humor, conflict, and shared experience. New words and new uses appear because people need labels for things they did not previously have to discuss in quite the same way. The lexicographers who track these shifts are recording more than definitions; they are recording pieces of history.

You may find the yearly announcements insightful, silly, or a bit of both. Either way, they ask us to notice the words we keep reaching for. That attention matters, because public life is shaped by the language we search, repeat, argue over, and pass on.