More WOTYs

« previous post |

Following up on yesterday's Macquarie announcement, here are some more 2024 Words Of The Year in Engish:

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.



2 Comments »

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment