The wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster have picked a small but powerful suffix as the 2015 word of the year: ism.
The top isms to earn lots of lookups on the dictionary company's website are socialism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism, and terrorism.
"We had a lot on our minds this year," muses Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices. We're educating ourselves."
Pinpointing why words spike at Merriam-Webster.com is an educated guess. The company tries to link lookups to real-life news events. Researchers crunch data to filter out words looked up year after year.
Other popular ism words were professionalism, federalism, pragmatism, and Marxism.
The company began picking a word of the year in 2003. Last year’s word was culture.
Other dictionary companies do the same. This year Oxford Dictionaries’ “word” was an emoji called "Face with Tears of Joy."
I’d protest calling that a word, but that might be “snobbism.”
