The dictionary words of the year 2018 included many that were environment related, whether as top scoring words or runners up. This past year, the scenario has not changed; rather, there appears to be even more concern with the environment.The Oxford Word of the Year is climate emergency. According to the dictionary’s editors, the term was used a hundred times more frequently in 2019 than in the previous year. The Cambridge Word of the Year, chosen because it was the most popular Word of the Day once, is upcycling, meaning “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material”. According to the Cambridge Dictionary blog, while reversing climate change, or even stopping its progression, appears difficult, upcycling is a concrete step towards that which could be taken individually. Lookups of the word have risen 181% since 2011, when it was introduced into the dictionary. Other terms on the Cambridge shortlist for 2019 also reflect environmental concerns: carbon sink, compostable, and preservation. A new addition is plastic footprint, meaning the amount of plastic wasted rather than recycled, hence damaging the environment. Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year is existential, also due to frequent lookups. Among other things, the term has been used in relation to climate change as an “existential crisis” and an “existential emergency”. The Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “climate strike”, first registered in 2015; lexicographers noted a one-hundred-fold increase in its lookups in 2019.
On a different note, the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year is they in its relatively new non-binary sense. The new sense entered the Webster Dictionary in September 2019 due to increased lookups, and the American Psychological Association blog endorsed the use of the pronoun in October in a post entitled “Welcome Singular They”. The use is now officially accepted in academic writing after gender experts updated the APA’s bias free language guidelines. “They” may be used as a generic pronoun to replace “he or she” or to refer to individuals who prefer not to be referred to as either.
