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Surreal, meaning
“marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream” was looked
up so much by online users that Merriam-Webster on Monday dubbed
it the 2016 word of the year.
Surreal joined the Oxford English Dictionary’s “post-truth” and
Dictionary.com’s “xenophobia” as top words of the year.
“Our word of the year is one that people came back to over and
over again in response to several events, and it gives us a look
at 2016, according to what sent us to the dictionary,”
Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski said in a video
posted by the company on its website.
Merriam-Webster began tracking dictionary lookup trends in 1996,
the same year the dictionary first landed online. The publisher
said it ranks the word based off two criteria: a significant
year-over-year increase in lookups online, and a high volume of
lookups.
“Surreal” had its most significant spike this year following the
U.S. presidential election in November, Sokolowski said.
Searches for the word first surged after the Brussels attack in
March and then again in July after the Bastille Day massacre in
Nice, France and a coup attempt in Turkey.
The word was first defined in a Merriam-Webster dictionary in
1967 and derives from the Surrealism artistic movement of the
early 1900s.
In recent history, “surreal” rose to the top of searches after
the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the
Newtown shootings that left 26 children and educators at a
Connecticut elementary school dead in 2012, the Boston Marathon
bombings in 2013 and comedian Robin Williams’ suicide in 2014,
according to Merriam-Webster.
Other words on Merriam-Webster’s notable list:
Icon - The spike in lookups came after Prince’s death on April
21, when searchers were also looking up “surreal.”
Bigly - Looked up mostly during the U.S. presidential election
after then Republican candidate Donald Trump, using “big league”
as an adverb, made it sound like the word “bigly.”
Deplorable - Democratic president candidate Hillary Clinton,
during the election, famously called Trump supporters a “basket
full of deplorables.”
Merriam-Webster’s complete list of notable 2016 words can be
found at http://bit.ly/2gTOClO.
(Reporting by Renita D. Young; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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