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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year is determined by data.
The word must have been a top lookup at Merriam-Webster.com
in the past 12 months,
and it must have seen a significant increase in lookups
over the previous year.
Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they.
The shifting use of they has been the subject
of increasing study and commentary in recent years,
and especially in the past year.
Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019.
This curiosity is remarkable for a venerable old pronoun,
and it's a consequence of shifts
in the way the word they is used.
English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun
to correspond neatly with singular pronouns
like everyone, someone, and anyone.
And as a consequence,
they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.
Much of this use is unremarkable,
as in: No one has to come if they don't want to.
More recently, though,
they has also been used to refer to one person
whose gender identity is nonbinary,
a use that was prominent in the news in 2019.
The American Psychological Association
now recommends that singular they
be preferred in professional writing over he or she
when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown
or to a person who prefers they.
It's also increasingly common to see they and them
as a person's preferred pronouns in Twitter bios,
email signatures, and conference name tags.
Merriam-Webster added this sense
in a new definition this past September.
Among the words that make up our Top 10 for 2019,
several came from words looked up
because of politics in the news:
quid pro quo, impeach, and exculpate.
Egregious was used to describe the failures
of the navigation system of the 737 MAX planes.
Clemency was looked up
following the release of a woman imprisoned at 16.
Snitty was looked up
when Attorney General Barr used the word
to describe a letter from Robert Mueller.
Tergiversation is a bookish word
used in a column by George Will.
Crawdad is in the title of a bestseller.
Finally, the definite article the or the
spiked after The Ohio State University
filed a trademark application for its use.
People turn to the dictionary for lots of reasons,
and we can be sure of one thing from this evidence:
words matter.
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