Word of the year 2019

Every year, Oxford Dictionary selects a ‘Word of the year’, so does Dictionary.com and so do other sites as well. This year, they have done the same in 2019.

“In our data, it speaks to this sense of grappling with our survival, both literally and figuratively, that defined so much of the discourse,” said John Kelly, senior research editor at Dictionary.com, ahead of the announcement.


The words chosen by the site is ‘existential’ because it “inspires us to ask big questions about who we are and what our purpose is in the face of our various challenges — and it reminds us that we can make choices about our lives in how we answer those questions.”

Whereas Oxford Dictionary picked ‘climate emergency’ as their word of the year.

Usage of the phrase climate emergency increased steeply over the course of 2019, and by September it was more than 100 times as common as it had been the previous year as per the data collected by Oxford Dictionary.

Oxford Corpus climate emergency 2019

Moreover, Macquarie Dictionary has selected ‘cancel culture’ as its word for 2019. The committee chose ‘cancel culture’ because it believes the term “captures an important aspect of the past year’s zeitgeist”.

Last year, Merriam-Webster had chosen ‘justice’ as its word of the year while Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘toxic’, and ‘misinformation’ was Dictonary.com’s word of the year in 2018.

What is your word of the year?

Share it with us in the comments below.

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