Dictionary.com’s word of the year is…

While many words come up as ‘words of the year’, they all hold individual importance and relevance.

In keeping with this tradition, Dictionary.com — which is one of the leading digital dictionaries in the world — has announced that ‘woman’ is the 2022 word of the year. In a social media post it wrote: “It’s one of the oldest words in the English language. One that’s fundamental not just to our vocabulary but to who we are as humans. And yet it’s a word that continues to be a source of intense personal importance and societal debate. It’s a word that’s inseparable from the story of 2022.”

Explaining further the reason for choosing ‘woman’ as the word that defined 2022, it stated that this year, searches for the word on Dictionary.com “spiked significantly multiple times in relation to separate high-profile events, including the moment when a question about the very definition of the word was posed on the national stage”.

 

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“Our selection of ‘woman’ as our 2022 Word of the Year reflects how the intersection of gender, identity, and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary,” a statement read.

According to Dictionary.com, during the “height of the lookups for ‘woman’ in 2022”, searches for the word increased more than 1,400 per cent, which is a “massive leap for such a common word”. It said the biggest spike in search happened at the end of March 2022, during the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice in April.

The dictionary explained that this demonstrates how “issues of transgender identity and rights are frequently at the forefront of our national discourse”. “More than ever, we are all faced with questions about who gets to identify as a woman (or a man, or neither). The policies that these questions inform transcend the importance of any dictionary definition—they directly impact people’s lives,” it added.

Dictionary.com also shared that the interest in the word also came from women who became a part of the global discourse, such as when Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, “prompting discussion and debate about the life and the legacy of the woman who became one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs”. Iran’s Mahsa Amini, who died tragically this year and sparked debates and protests around the rights of women in the country also became a part of the mainstream conversation.

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