Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, along with newsmakers like Anthony Scaramucci, among others, drove users to Merriam-Webster’s website en masse
If you didn’t know what a « dotard » was before September, you probably do now.
Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary with the sassy Twitter feed, saw searches for certain words spike alongside major news events, thanks in part to a dizzying year of political scandals, tweets, gaffes and feuds.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, along with newsmakers like Anthony Scaramucci, among others, drove users to the dictionary’s website en masse to look up words they knew or thought they knew — as well as the totally made-up.
NBC News spoke with lexicographer and Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski to round up only the best words made famous in 2017.
Trump painted a dark picture of the country in his inaugural address.
« This American carnage stops right here and stops right now, » he declared, a turn of phrase that raised eyebrows in the Beltway and beyond.
Searches for « carnage » on Merriam-Webster.com surged a staggering 21,540 percent.
« A word like carnage would not draw our attention, » Sokolowski said. « The point being here is when a prominent person like a newsmaker, such as the president of the United States, uses language in a very particular way it suddenly seems more specific or slightly more real to a lot of people, so it drove a lot of traffic and people went to the dictionary. »
The word also made a comeback later in the year when the New York Daily News used it to criticize the political inaction after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October.
A month into Trump’s presidency, The Washington Post revealed its new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
On cue, Twitter erupted to mock the motto.
But others seem to have been inspired. The furor caused a large spike in searches for the word « democracy. »
« Because these are words that describe ideas, they require a lot of definition and thought, » Sokolowski said.
« Feminism » was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, and we have White House adviser Kellyanne Conway partly to thank.
According to Sokolowski, searches of the word spiked during key events times during the year, like the Women’s March on Washington, but when Conway said in February that it was » difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense, » it caused another surge.
With Conway using the phrase « in the classic sense, » it put the definition of « feminism » in question and the word itself became the news, he said.
Overall, look-ups for « feminism » increased 70 percent in 2017 over 2016, according to Merriam-Webster.
This word first spiked in January after Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator and a top adviser to Trump’s campaign, announced he would recuse himself from any Justice Department investigation into Hillary Clinton.
But according to Merriam-Webster, look-ups surged 56,550 percent in March when Sessions recused himself from the FBI’s investigation into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, which includes whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Sessions insisted that he had no improper contacts with the Russians, but nevertheless stepped aside from the probe because of his involvement in the Trump campaign.
