The Oxford University Press has announced that the word of the year will be voted for by the public for the first time - although you may find the shortlist disappointingly short and rather surprising.
Since “the true arbiters of language” are “people around the world”, Oxford Languages has decided to put the final decision on WOTY2022 in your hands.
Voting is now open online - until 00:01 on 2 December - and English speakers anywhere and everywhere can cast their vote, choosing from three words selected by Oxford University Press lexicographers, each of which they believe captures “the mood and ethos of the last year in its own way”.
The shortlisted words are “goblin mode”, a slang term that refers to behaviour that is “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”; “#IStandWith”, a hashtag used to express solidarity online; and “metaverse”, a term coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash to refer to a virtual reality environment, which has seen a dramatic growth in usage over the past year.
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said the decision to allow the public to make the final call was partly due to living in a “post-Covid era”.
“Over the past year the world reopened, and it is in that spirit we’re opening up the selection process for the word of the year to language-lovers everywhere,” he said. “We are all participants in the evolving story of English, and after making it through another hard year we thought word-lovers would appreciate being brought into the process with us.”
The “word” of the year has come to be defined somewhat loosely, as it is open to slang terms such as last year’s choice “vax” as well as compound words and phrases. Eyebrows may well be raised by the inclusion of a hashtag on this year’s shortlist, but senior editor at OUP Fiona McPherson said that while hashtags are technically “a stylised form of word”, they are eligible for the word of the year because they are “a really important feature” of current language usage. She also noted that people have begun to refer to hashtags in spoken as well as in written English.
Wade in and cast your vote for WOTY2022