Word of the day 2015

Contents

-ism

A suffix is the Word of the Year because a small group of words that share this three-letter ending triggered both high volume and significant year-over-year increase in lookups at Merriam-Webster.com. Taken together, these seven words represent millions of individual dictionary lookups.

Read on to find more about each of these words, and the events that triggered them, as well as five other words that sent us to the dictionary in 2015.

The suffix -ism goes all the way back to Ancient Greek, and was used in Latin and medieval French on its way to English. Originally, it turned a verb into a noun: think of baptize and baptism, criticize and criticism, or plagiarize and plagiarism. It has since acquired many other uses, including identifying a religion or practice (Calvinism, vegetarianism), a prejudice based on a specific quality (sexism, ageism), an adherence to a system (stoicism, altruism), a condition based on excess of something (alcoholism), or a characteristic feature or trait (colloquialism).

Ism is also sometimes a noun meaning “a distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory” or “an oppressive and especially discriminatory attitude or belief.” It’s usually used to emphasize a group of -ism words, as in “cubism, abstract expressionism, and all the other isms.”

There are 2733 English words ending in -ism entered in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary. The top seven isms account for millions of lookups in 2015.

Curiosity about this year’s top word, socialism, has been especially intense this year. It jumped several spots to #7 on the all-time most looked-up word list, with an increase of 169% over last year. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist,” and the word spiked in the summer when large crowds showed up at multi-city rallies organized through social media, and again after the first Democratic debate in October.

The fact that a major-party candidate for president embraces socialism shows that the term has moved beyond its Cold War associations. The complex meanings of socialism have required new information at its dictionary entry:

In the modern era, “pure” socialism has been seen only rarely and usually briefly in a few Communist regimes. Far more common are systems of social democracy, now often referred to as “democratic socialism,” in which extensive state regulation, with limited state ownership, has been employed by democratically elected governments (as in Sweden and Denmark) in the belief that it produces a fair distribution of income without impairing economic growth.

Significant spikes for fascism (“a political philosophy…that exalts nation and often race above the individual”) occurred following attacks in Paris, Colorado Springs, and San Bernardino. Taken together with spikes for terrorism immediately following these events, we see that fear of threats from without are echoed by fear of threats from within; proposals for heightened security and surveillance, anti-immigration policies, and comments about the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump all provide the context in which fascism appears. (A similar pattern was seen following the attacks on 9/11, when the spike in terrorism lookups had an echo in the heightened interest in jingoism.)

In November, some conservatives began using fascist to describe Trump’s proposals and style, and at the beginning of December, writers for Slate and the New York Times and a commentator on CNN all referred to Trump as a “fascist,” sending many people to the dictionary.

With horrific attacks in Paris, Colorado Springs, and San Bernardino, in addition to the world’s focus on the activities of ISIS in the Middle East, terrorism was much on our minds and in the news this year. It has been looked up 110% more overall this year than last, and that figure jumped to 400% after the Paris attacks.

Terrorism originally meant violence perpetrated by a government on its people, taking its name from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Today we usually use terrorism to mean “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.”

Hypocrite spiked this year when news broke that Josh Duggar had an account on Ashley Madison, a site for those looking to cheat on their spouse. Duggar had worked for the conservative Family Research Council and said that he and his wife saved their first kiss for their wedding day. He confessed to having an account on the site, saying, “I have been the biggest hypocrite ever.”

Hypocrite lookups give us a window into changing dictionary behavior: it was looked up nearly three times more frequently on mobile than on desktop this year.

Respect, which is rising in our rankings to join other perennially researched terms like empathy and integrity, isn’t strongly linked to any specific news stories. It may connect with other words looked up this year, like racism and feminism, as part of the background or subtext of a wider national conversation.

It was looked up much more on mobile than on desktop this year. As with hypocrite, we may be seeing a different kind of behavior caused by having a dictionary in our pocket at all times. On a desktop computer at work we may look up words for spelling and usage and to follow the news of the day, but lookups that are more personal that reflect our daily emotional lives seem to correlate with mobile use and a greater proportion of younger users.