‘Woman’ is 2022 Word of the Year, says Dictionary.com

Online word search platform, Dictionary.com, has chosen “woman” as the word of the year for 2022.

The announcement was made on Tuesday, December 13 and the platform described the word as “inseparable from the story of 2022” and also noted it “continues to be a source of intense personal importance and societal debate”.

The website stated that during 2022, searches for the word increased more than 1,400% and subsequent spikes eventually resulted in double the typical annual search volume.

The biggest search spike started at the end of March, during a confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in April became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice. Specifically, the surge in lookups came after she was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn to provide a definition for the word woman.

“This year, searches for the word woman 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. 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,” Dictionary.com noted in a release.

In May, a leak revealed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and online searches for woman surged again. Further search spikes occurred again in June and July.

The website said,

“The dictionary is not the last word on what defines a woman. The word belongs to each and every woman—however they define themselves.”

Ukraine flag emoji, inflation, quiet quitting, democracy and Wordle made it to the shortlist for Word of the Year.

In 2021, the word of the year was ‘allyship’, while ‘pandemic’ captured the title for word of the year in 2020. ,,

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Source: Dictionary.com