Merriam-Webster’s 2024 Word of the Year Makes Not-So-Subtle Nod to U.S. Politics
OH MY WORD
The oldest dictionary publisher in the country decreed that ‘polarization’ was the word on everyone’s lips in a year defined by the presidential election.
‘Polarization’ is officially Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year, in a not-so-subtle nod to the U.S. in the wake of the election. The American publisher revealed the choice to AP ahead of the official announcement. “Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, told the title. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.” Merriam-Webster’s choice is backed by the huge search traffic its site receives, and this year the data suggested that people wanted the exact definition of the word—especially in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election win. The site’s own definition reads: “Division into two sharply distinct opposites especially:a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes."
