Merriam-Webster announced its 2015 Word of the Year. This time, it’s a small but powerful suffix: -ism.
The choice was based on high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on the dictionary’s website. In 2015, people were searching for socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism, and terrorism. The searches reflect what the general culture is trying to learn about.
"We had a lot on our minds this year," mused Peter Sokolowski. He is Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices. We're educating ourselves."
The dictionary company tries each year to pinpoint reasons why certain words go on the run. It tracks corresponding news events to link to lookups online. Company researchers crunch data in a way that filters out common words frequently looked up year after year.
Big events in the news that contributed to searches for those -isms included a shooting in November. A black teen in Chicago was shot by a white police officer, and searches for the term “fascism” followed. “Racism” was commonly searched all year long, but it had two noticeable spikes. One happened after a gunman killed nine people in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The other peaked amid protests about racial activity at the University of Missouri.
Other dictionaries also select a Word of the Year. This past year, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries took a different approach. They selected a pictograph instead of an actual word. It’s an emoji called “Face with Tears of Joy.”
Maybe that will prompt the next big spike on dictionary searches to be for the word “word.”