What word best reflects “the ethos, mood, or preoccupations” of 2022? The past two years were all about COVID-19 – pandemic, quarantine, vaccine. This year dictionaries have (mostly) moved on, and 2022’s Words of the Year (WOTYs) are a diverse bunch.
Oxford Languages generated huge publicity with its choice: goblin mode, the perhaps predictable result of opening voting up to the general public for the first time. More than 300,000 people participated, and 93% chose it over metaverse (an immersive virtual world) and #IStandWith (a hashtag that indicates support, such as #IStandWithUkraine).
Goblin mode first showed up on Twitter in 2009, but no one was quite sure what it meant. It was used to describe everything from zooming cats to people doing odd dances. It was an evocative term in search of a definition. Now it has an official one: “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” This definition has quickly been adopted on social media, perhaps because, as Oxford explains, it “resonates with all of us who are feeling a little overwhelmed at this point.”
Going goblin mode is one way of reacting to “permanent crisis” or permacrisis, the WOTY from Collins Dictionary. This “extended period of instability and insecurity” is apropos to 2022, according to one Collins editor, because the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate change, and inflation can make us feel as if we’re “lurching from one crisis to another without really drawing breath.”
Merriam-Webster selected gaslighting, because online searches for it went up 1740% in 2022. Merriam-Webster offers a precise definition: “to psychologically manipulate (a person) usually over an extended period of time so that the victim questions the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality.” It is now often used to refer to general dishonesty.
My favorite WOTY comes from United Kingdom-based Cambridge Dictionaries, because it reflects not a global or moral crisis, but the worldwide popularity of the language game Wordle. Wordle players must guess a five-letter word within six tries. Though Wordle’s designers took care to use common words, they speak American English, and thus some solutions have confused speakers of other English varieties. The “highest-spiking” word on Cambridge sites was homer, slang from a mostly North American game that puzzled people who prefer soccer and cricket. Humor was next – much of the world spells it humour – followed by caulk, the waterproof sealant. It’s not that British showers all leak – it’s that they call it “silicone sealant.”