More WOTYs
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Following up on yesterday's Macquarie announcement, here are some more 2024 Words Of The Year in Engish:
- Dictionary.com: demure (see also CNN's coverage, with more details and links)
- Collins Dictionary: brat (CNN's coverage)
- Cambridge Dictionary: manifest
- Oxford (voting — shortlist is slop, romantasy, lore, brain rot, demure, and dynamic pricing)
- Merriam-Webster — 2024 choice still pending
Wikipedia's Word of the year page tells us that this all started in 1971 with the German Wort des Jahres from the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, which has not announced its 2024 pick yet. The WotY concept was picked up in 1990 by the American Dialect Society, which makes the choice at a live nominating session and a live vote at its annual meeting. The ADS 2024 WotY will be selected at the 2025 conference:
The American Dialect Society will hold its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America Thursday, January 9, through Sunday, January 12, 2025, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The meeting will be held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.
The Wikipedia WotY page also links to lists from Austria, several regional German dialects, Denmark, Japan, Liechtenstein, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine. In addition to the Wikipedia link, there's an internet page naming вайб (= "vibe") as the Russian WotY.
There don't seem to be any French, Italian, or Spanish WotYs, but maybe readers can supply some.
Coby said,
November 27, 2024 @ 9:50 am
For Spanish, an organization called Fundación del Español Urgente (www.fundeu.es) picks a palabra del año. Last year's was polarización. This year's hasn't been picked yet.
David Marjanović said,
November 27, 2024 @ 11:38 am
Austria's word of the year 2016: Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung "federal presidential runoff election repetition postponement". The runoff had to be repeated because the counting was done too sloppily the first time, and then the repetition had to be postponed because it was discovered that the glue on the envelopes for the mail-in ballots didn't hold, so new envelopes had to be made.
Steven said,
November 27, 2024 @ 4:55 pm
Sorry that my comment is not related to this post. It seems that Language Log has stopped updating on X since late September. Does anyone know why? Thanks!
Yves Rehbein said,
November 28, 2024 @ 12:53 am
@ Steven, see the WOTY post from two days ago
Yves Rehbein said,
November 28, 2024 @ 12:56 am
Word of the year? How about word of the day?
>turducken
(US, cooking) A dish, usually roasted, consisting of a deboned turkey …
the subtext elucidates, "Happy Thanksgiving!" Why thanks to the Wiktionary TIL!
Andreas Johansson said,
November 28, 2024 @ 3:35 am
In further proof of how out of touch I am, the "demure" thing had completely passed me by.
Philip Taylor said,
November 28, 2024 @ 3:59 am
You are not alone, Andreas. I was equally unaware of [the current non-standard usages of] "brat", "manifest", "slot", "romantacy" and "lore", as well as the original "enshitification".
Peter Taylor said,
November 28, 2024 @ 5:24 am
I accidentally voted for demure for the Oxford WOTY, thinking that the button was a tab to expand which would explain why it was a candidate.
Philip Taylor said,
November 28, 2024 @ 6:08 am
I did exactly the same for "slop". I wonder what fraction of the votes counted were involuntarily cast in this way ? (Of course, it could be that only people with the surname "Taylor" are prone to this sort of error …).
Circeus said,
November 28, 2024 @ 8:33 am
In Switzerland, ZHAW (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) has been naming a French Swiss WOTY since 2017, in Italian since 2018 and Romansh since 2019. Prior to ZHAW, a special institution named a German word of the year from 2003 to 2016. Since 2017 the French WOTYs have been:
2017. harcèlement
2018. charge mentale
2019. vague verte
2020. coronagraben
2021. iel
2022. boycotter
2023. décombres
the WOTY for 2024 has not yet been chosen
/df said,
November 28, 2024 @ 12:22 pm
Is a Swiss-French green wave (2019) the same as a Danish one, ie a sequence of traffic lights co-ordinated to favour a constant speed just under the applicable limit?
Circeus said,
November 29, 2024 @ 8:21 am
Nope. Far as I can tell it's about the electoral success of the green party that year.
Jake V. said,
December 2, 2024 @ 12:13 am
Oxford has announced its WOTY as "brain rot". Looking at the shortlist, I think it's the best choice. Brainrot represents a newly trending word in 2024, and it's probably the most ubiquitous on the list (my impressions as one of the more young users of LLog: demure and romantasy seemed to hit limited communities, slop never really caught on, no normal people talked about dynamic pricing, and lore has been popular for many years).
In my experience, it's always written as "brainrot," so it's interesting that the lexicographers chose the form they did. A brief imprecise Google search indicates that the combined version is four times as common as the separated version.
https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/