The Words of the Year According to Merriam Webster

The extended psychological manipulation of someone leading them to question their own perceptions or sanity became known as “gaslighting” thanks to a 1938 British play called “Gas Light” and a subsequent movie, “Gaslight” (1944). It came into relatively common use only in the 2010s, though – and today “gaslighting” has become the favored word to describe the perception of deception in this age of misinformation and “fake news.”

In general terms, an oligarch is a member of an oligarchy – a small group that controls an institution or a country – but it has come to be applied today primarily to people in Russia and other former Soviet states with considerable wealth and influence largely obtained through acquiring former state assets. Interest in the term surged after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. Following that incursion, many countries such as the U.S. and United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and their families. Lookups for the word “oligarch” leaped 621% in early March 2022.

In November 2021, the World Health Organization designated the word “omicron,” the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, to identify the most recent variant of the Covid-19 virus. The WHO previously used the Greek letters alpha, beta, gamma, and delta to name the virus’ variants.

Searches online for the word “codify” – which usually means to classify or systemize – surged 193% earlier this year after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24. Lookups for the word spiked 8,304% on June 30, the biggest jump in one day, after President Biden said he would back ending the congressional filibuster in order to codify the national right to an abortion.

The acronym LGBTQIA adds some letters to the more familiar abbreviations LGBT and LGBTQ. The full abbreviation stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (one’s sexual or gender identity), intersex, and asexual/aromantic/agender. Interest in the acronym surged in June and November because of two events that could not have been more disparate. The abbreviation climbed 1,178% in June because that is Pride Month, when gay culture, rights, and equality are celebrated. In late November, searches skyrocketed again because of a shooting in a gay night club in Colorado that killed five people.

Searches for the word sentient, meaning responsive to sensory stimuli, rose 480% in June when Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot, LaMDA, had developed a human-like consciousness. Google denied the claim and fired Lemoine, saying his claims were “wholly unfounded” after reviewing them.

Credit the online puzzle-solvers toiling over online word game Quordle with bringing “loamy” – which Merriam Webster defines as “consisting of loam, a soil consisting of a friable mixture of varying proportions of clay, silt, and sand” – to the forefront. The word was a Quordle answer on Aug. 29, leading to a search surge of 4.5 million – yes, million – percent.

Lookups of the word “raid,” meaning a brief,usually hostile attack by a small force, spiked 970% in early August after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-al-Lago, the Florida home of former president Donald Trump, to seek classified documents the ex-president allegedly had stored there. The FBI’s action prompted searches of worlds like “trove” – a large amount of something collected – to describe the volume of material found there and “banana republic” – a term used to describe a despotically run country, which Trump defenders claimed described the way the U.S. government was treating the ex-president.

When Queen Elizabeth died in September after 70 years as the reigning British monarch, her son Charles ascended to the throne. Charles’ wife Camilla is referred to as Queen Consort, the wife of the reigning king. The term, largely unfamiliar to the public, prompted a surge of online searches. Camilla is not in line to succeed to the throne. Her duties will include going on official trips, appearing in public on behalf of the royal family, and supporting charities. Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, had had a similar status and was known as the Prince Consort.