Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness) reports that Jay Schwartz, Dictionary.com’s head of content, said, “We’re taking a stand on this choice. We think that it’s immensely rewarding to find existing words that capture a precise experience, and this year, tumult has been the norm rather than the exception. There are contested public spaces around the world, where people are demonstrating in one direction or another. Opinions and circumstances have been oscillating so much.”
This year’s verbal shortlist included “occupy,” “austerity,” “jobs” (both the noun and the person), “zugzwang,” and “insidious.”
Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) declared its Word of the Year 2011 to be “squeezed middle” (“the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those on low or middle incomes”).
Other words and phrases considered by OED included Arab Spring, hacktivism, phone hacking, sodcasting, bunga bunga, crowdfunding, facepalm, and fracking,
Also see OED’s “What Makes a Word of the Year?”
Merriam-Webster’s (@MerriamWebster) word last year, as listed in its archive, was “austerity.” In 2011, Merriam-Webster lists the words that “spiked in lookups” each month because of events in the news (such as “vitriol” in January, “inclement” in February, and “prefecture” in March). For its 2011 word of the year, Merriam-Webster selected “pragmatic.”
Wikipedia chronicles a history of words of the year as selected by the American Dialect Society (@americandialect) (#woty11). ADS will chose its 2001 Word of the Year at its annual meeting in January in Portland, Oregon. Last year’s word was “app.”