Merriam-Webster

The results of the 2024 US presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is polarisation? Polarisation means division, but it's a very specific kind of division, said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday's announcement. Polarisation means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the centre. The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was an existential threat to the nation. According to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, about 8 in 10 Kamala Harris voters were very or somewhat concerned that Donald Trump's views but not Harris' were too extreme, while about 7 in 10 Trump voters felt the same way about Harris but not Trump. The Merriam-Webster

Prominent dictionaries have taken note of the technology that is the talk of the town

Merriam-Webster dictionary also released an infographic to illustrate how words are added to the official lexicon

This was a word that was extremely high in our data every single day in 2021, Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large said

Croatia PM and wife test positive, Zoom sales jump four-fold, Vietnam reports first case in nearly three months and other pandemic-related news across the globe

If you were to choose a word that rose above most in 2020, which word would it be? Ding, ding, ding: Merriam-Webster announced pandemic as its 2020 word of the year

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