Words of the year, and the mood they catch

Around this time every year, the dictionaries hold their annual election. Oxford, Cambridge, Collins and their counterparts each crown a word of the year, chosen not by a panel but by the evidence of usage, the words that measurably rose through the preceding twelve months. The announcements arrive in December with the inevitability of the season itself, and they are read, rightly, as a kind of referendum: the word that won is the word the year needed, and the year’s anxieties, excitements and evasions are all supposed to be legible in it.

The exercise is genuinely informative, more than its critics allow. A word of the year is a data point about collective attention, the vocabulary that expanded fastest when people reached for language to describe what was happening to them. When a term for an unfamiliar phenomenon surges, it marks the moment a shared experience acquired a name, and naming, as every discipline knows, is the first step of understanding. The annual word is a snapshot of what a society could not stop talking about, and for that reason alone it is worth reading, the way a poll is worth reading even when one disagrees with it.

But the snapshot has known distortions, and it is worth keeping them in mind during the ceremony. The word of the year favours the novel, because novelty is measurable and familiarity is not, and so it systematically overrepresents the new and the loud at the expense of the slow and the constant. No year’s word will ever be the word for the quiet griefs that most of life consists of, because those do not spike in usage; they are not new. The selection is drawn from a very particular population, the portion of speech that gets written down, digitised and counted, which skews toward public, professional and platform language and away from the private talk in which most people actually live.

There is also the question of what the ceremony does to the words it crowns. A word selected for prominence enters its own small fame, repeated in the coverage that announces it, and the repetition manufactures some of the evidence for the choice. The dictionaries are honest about their methods, and the honest methods have this feedback built in: by December, the word of the year is partly the word that the word-of-the-year coverage made. The ceremony is not a pure measurement. It is a measurement that participates in what it measures, which makes it a cultural event as much as a linguistic one.

None of this should spoil the pleasure of the announcement, which is one of the nicer small rituals of the closing year, and it should not be mistaken for a reason to dismiss the exercise. The right way to read the word of the year is the right way to read any good data: with gratitude for what it shows and awareness of what it leaves out. The word that a year crowns is a true word, but it is one among many, the loudest in a choir that also sang the quiet notes, and the language, as always, held them all.