From AI slop to rage bait, to the cryptic ‘6-7,’ this year’s slate captures a growing sense that online life is flooded with fakery, frustration and meaninglessness.
Articles on Word of the Year
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AI slop was the clear winner with honourable mentions including another AI-related word: clanker. But where are the colourful expressions of previous years?
Words of the year do not have to be new coinages, but may be existing words that seem to have become particularly apposite or resonant.
The winners offer a window into the spirit of the times.
2023 will be remembered for more than quirky new phrases.
An expert on rhetoric explains why ‘rizz’ may be more like charm than charisma.
Innovations in AI seem to be spurring interest in what is or isn’t real, accurate and human.
Surprisingly, Macquarie’s list of the words of 2022 hasn’t highlighted the war in Ukraine or climate change. It embraced Australian political terms, while the people chose the ‘bachelor’s handbag’.
Crises are no longer something to fix but situations to manage.
Criticism of the Morrison government’s slow vaccine rollout has taken out the Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
It would be ‘aggressively Australian’, holding a mirror up to contemporary society. The creation of the first Macquarie Dictionary, while not without controversies, was a cultural milestone.
The Macquarie Dictionary has chosen “doomscrolling” and “rona” as its words of the year. The Australian National Dictionary chose “iso”. Is “quazza” too far?
Pronouns rarely, if ever, change. Then along came the gender nonbinary ‘they,’ which was just anointed ‘word of the decade.’
Pyt doesn’t have an exact English translation, but there’s a rich strain of psychological research devoted to its benefits in everyday life.
‘Milkshake duck’, a word created in 2016 on Twitter, is the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year. Efforts to coin new words have a long history and were particularly in vogue in the 1980s.
All over the world, people are trying to boil down their experiences of 2016 into a single word. The results speak for themselves.
The Macquarie Dictionary last week named “mansplain” its word of the year for 2014. The Dictionary defines mansplain as: verb (t) Colloquial (humorous) (of a man) to explain (something) to a woman, in…
Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014. The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism…
Each year the Macquarie Dictionary names a Word of the Year from a shortlist of words that have made a valuable contribution to the language. And it has declared 2013 to be the year … of … the … “infovore…
Top contributors
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Honorary Associate Professor in Writing, The University of Queensland
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Roger J. Kreuz is a Friend of The Conversation.
Associate Dean and Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor, University of Memphis
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Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University
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Director of Slang and New Language Archive, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London
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Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Head of Department: English, Linguistics and Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University
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Professor of Rhetoric, University of Sussex
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Professor of Psychology, Dickinson College
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Professor Emeritus, The University of Queensland
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Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, The Open University
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Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, Aston University