The premier US dictionary’s pick, based on search traffic, reflects a year of political and celebrity division
Collins dictionary went with “brat”. Oxford chose “brain rot”. But in a brutally divided country, the US’s premier dictionary skipped the slang: Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “polarization”.
The announcement comes in an election year that put the concept on display, as Kamala Harris warned of fascism under Donald Trump, while Trump resorted to name-calling and claimed his opponent was running on “destruction”. As the dictionary put it, polarization “happens to be one idea that both sides of the political spectrum agree on”.
Merriam-Webster defines polarization 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.” In other words, as Peter Sokolowski, the dictionary’s editor-at-large, told the Associated Press, it “means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center”.
And it’s not just politics that have divided the US – Americans have also dug in their heels over celebrity news – the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, for instance – and sports, as in controversy over the gymnast Jordan Chiles’s bronze medal at the Olympics.
