Word of the Year 2024

This year’s word of the year for Lebanon should be "resilience" in my view. People stayed put while huge explosions went off a few buildings away. The airport did not close but rather kept going while travelers watched the loud fireworks in the distance. Villagers returned to their land as soon as the war calmed down, rather than fleeing the country. Yet my annual blog entry on the “Word of the Year” is not meant to be about Lebanon or the Middle East, but rather words ranked by prominent English language dictionaries as worthy of the label, whether due to their statistical significance in frequency of lookups, due to the importance of their meaning in the year’s context, or through an interesting linguistic change or feature.

The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is the word “manifest”, which is now being used in a positive sense rather than always carrying negative connotations as in “the illness became manifest” or “their madness manifested itself”. Rather, the dictionary refers to  “a host of manifesting influencers [that] popped up on social media, giving tips on how to manifest money, career success, or more generally, abundance”. This new sense of the word that was added to the dictionary in 2023 is defined as “to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen”.

The Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is “brain rot”: “Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” The dictionary authors justify the choice by referring to its increase in usage by 230% in one year though it was first spotted in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, has noted that the language is reflecting society’s concern with people’s virtual lives as part of online culture, along with its distractions and dangers.

While “brain rot” was shortlisted by the Collins Dictionary, their word of the year is the adjective “brat”, as in “a brat summer”: characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude. As for Webster’s favourite word this year, it is “polarization”, defined as “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.” The grounds for their choice are its frequency in the media, especially with regard to US politics, including the elections and tensions over immigration.

Back to “resilience”, it actually scored even higher than “manifest” did for total searches on Cambridge Dictionary’s website: "It’s a powerful word, reflecting the strength and adaptability needed in challenging times," Cambridge said. 

In these difficult times globally, I wish my readers more resilience and a new year with less brain rot, less polarization, and calmer, more peaceful manifestation.