Words of the Year 2023

 

by Sybil Johnson 

Words of the year for 2023 have been announced by various organizations. A number of them use word of the year in the broader sense of vocabulary item so suffixes, phrases, etc. are fair game.

Merriam-Webster chose ‘authentic’ as their word for 2023. They define it as “not false or imitation,” or “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” According to Merriam-Webster, look ups of authentic saw a substantial increase this year. I thought that was interesting. I guess the word has been bandied about lately. Don’t really remember that, but then I’m not up on what’s going on in the social media world these days. Other than Twitter/X’s rapid decline. Read more about it here. 

Collins, a British dictionary, chose “AI” as their word of the year defining it as “abbreviation for artificial intelligence: the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs.”. Artificial intelligence has certainly been in the news a lot this last year. This choice seems like a reasonable one to me. Read more here.

The Cambridge dictionary chose “hallucinate”. I wondered for a bit if I was hallucinating this, but then I read on. Apparently, this also has to do with AI. From the Cambridge website, “When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.” Read more here. 

The Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) chose "cozzie livs". Sounds pretty Australian, doesn’t it? It was coined in the UK, though, but seems to resonate with Australians. This is a light-hearted play on cost of living. “Blue-sky flood” and “algospeak” were honorable mentions.Blue-sky flood comes from floods that occur  not from rain storms, but attributable to high tides or rising sea levels. These often occur when skies are clear. Algospeak is another reference to AI. It refers to “code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems.” They also have a People’s Choice word of the year: generative AI. Read more here.

The Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is “rizz”. This is short for charisma or“someone's ability to attract another person through style, charm, or attractiveness.” The finalists were “prompt” (an instruction given to an artificial intelligence program, algorithm, etc., which determines or influences the content it generates), “situationship” (a romantic or sexual relationship that is not considered to be formal or established), “Swiftie” (an enthusiastic fan of the singer Taylor Swift). I don’t know if Taylor Swift’s popularity has increased, but she sure has been in the news lately. She seems to have “rizz”. Read more here. 

The American Dialect Society will select its word of the year at its annual meeting in January 2024. The 2023 word of the year was a suffix “–ussy”. Not sure why this is. I guess a lot of people have been putting it at the end of words. And, apparently, I am out of touch with this trend. You can read more about why they chose it here.

I noticed that a lot of them have to do with artificial intelligence. Not really all that surprised about that.

What word do you think should be the word of the year?

Googleganger and Dracula Sneeze

With less than a week to go before my deadline, I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train!

On my breaks from writing, I’ve been watching lectures from the Great Courses. Nonfiction topics seem to clear my mind so, when I go back to work, I can more clearly see the story I'm writing.

I check the courses out from my local library through Hoopla. (It’s a great resource, by the way. See if your library subscribes to it. My own books are available through it, both in e-book and audio formats.)

The latest course I’ve been enjoying is “Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins.” Anne Curzan is the lecturer. She’s a professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of Michigan. She also is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel and co-host of That’s What They Say on Michigan Public Radio. She’s a great lecturer. I highly recommend it.

Secret Life of Words covers a number of topics including The Life of a Word, The Human Hands Behind Dictionaries, and Often versus “Offen”. There are 36 lectures total. I’ve only viewed a handful so far.

In the first lecture (Winning Words, Banished Words), Professor Curzan talked about how the American Dialect Society chooses its words of the year. It’s interesting enough, I thought I’d tell you about it.

The ADS conference meets every January and votes. Anyone who attends can take part in the discussion as well as vote. There’s an open floor for debate on the choices, ending in the participants raising their hands to vote on which word they believe should be the “word of the year” for the previous year.

The word of the year for 2018 was tender-age shelter. I admit I’ve never heard of this one. It refers to the government-run detention centers that have housed the children of asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border. That has been a bit of a preoccupation of the U.S. this last year so I can understand why it was selected.

In 2000, the ADS also voted on “Word of the Millennium”. The finalists were “the”, “she”, “government” and “science”. “She” won out. Here’s a few interesting things I learned about the pronoun. (1) No one’s sure of its origin, (2) The word is new to the millennium. It first appeared in a written document in 1154, and (3) It may reflect language contact with Old Norse.

There are several categories the ADS votes on besides “Word of the Year". One of the more interesting categories is "Most Creative".

Past winners of Most Creative Word have been:

Googleganger: when you google yourself, these are the people who come up that aren’t you

Dracula sneeze: a sneeze into your elbow

Recombobulation area: area after security at airports where you put shoes back on and basically put yourself together before heading to your gate

gate lice: airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board

You can find all of the nominees and vote tallies for all of these words and more on the ADS website.