The Associated Press
NEW YORK–This may or may not come as a surprise: Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2017 is “feminism.”
Yes, it’s been a big year or two or 100 for the word.
In 2017, look-ups for feminism increased 70 percent over 2016 on Merriam-Webster.com and spiked several times after key events, lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, the company’s editor at large, told The Associated Press ahead of today’s annual word reveal.
There was the Women’s March on Washington in January, along with sister demonstrations around the globe.
And heading into the year was Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and references linking her to white-clad suffragettes, along with her loss to President Donald Trump, who once boasted about grabbing women.
The “Me Too” movement rose out of Harvey Weinstein’s dust, and other “silence breakers” brought down rich and famous men of media, politics, and the entertainment worlds.
Feminism has been in Merriam-Webster’s annual top 10 for the last few years, including sharing word-of-the-year honours with other “isms” in 2015.
Socialism, fascism, racism, communism, capitalism, and terrorism rounded out the bunch.
Surreal was the word of the year last year.
“The word feminism was being used in a kind of general way,” Sokolowski said by phone from the company’s headquarters in Springfield, Mass.
“The feminism of this big protest, but it was also used in a kind of specific way: what does it mean to be a feminist in 2017?” he added.
“Those kinds of questions are the kinds of things, I think, that send people to the dictionary.”
Feminism’s roots are in the Latin for “woman” and the word “female,” which dates to 14th-century English.
Sokolowski had to look no further than his company’s founder, Noah Webster, for the first dictionary reference, in 1841, which isn’t all that old in the history of English.
“It was a very new word at that time,” Sokolowski noted. “His definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today.
“His definition was, ‘The qualities of females,’ so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness.
“We do see evidence that the word was used in the 19th century in a medical sense, for the physical characteristics of a developing teenager, before it was used as a political term, if you will.
“We had no idea he was the original dictionary source of feminism,” Sokolowski added.
Today, Merriam-Webster defines feminism as the “theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activities on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”
Merriam-Webster had nine runners-up, in no particular order, including “complicit,” which was competitor Dictionary.com’s word of the year.
Others were recuse, empathy, dotard (used by Kim Jong-un to describe Trump), syzygy (the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies, such as the sun, moon, and Earth during a solar or lunar eclipse), and gyro (a phenom celebrated in a Jimmy Fallon sketch on “The Tonight Show”).
Rounding out the list were federalism (which Lindsey Graham referred to in discussing the future of the Affordable Care Act), hurricane (which Sokolowski suspects is because people are confused about wind speed), and gaffe (such as what happened at the Academy Awards when the wrong best picture winner was announced).
