It’s Word of the Year season, and all the best dictionaries have been announcing their candidate for word of the year—or WOTY as lexicographers call it. Merriam-Webster picked polarization as its 2024 word of the year. The Collins Dictionary picked brat. Oxford Dictionaries opted for brain rot (yes, the word of the year can be a phrase as well as a word). Dictionary dot com chose demure, but that choice comes with an asterisk, because the main thing dictionary dot com did this year was fire all of its lexicographers, which makes it, by definition, not-a-dictionary.
And speaking of lexicographers, what would the great lexicographers of the past pick for the 2024 word of the year? Here's what some of them have to say.
Robert Cawdrey, who wrote A Table Alphabetical, the first English dictionary, in 1604, considered several candidates for Word of the Year. There’s deportation, which he defined rather mildly as ‘carrying away,’ though its use in 2024 was more sinister.
Cawdrey came close to picking licentious, ‘taking libertie to doe evill.’
Or obnubilate, ‘to make darke,’ which seems to characterize 2024 very accurately.
There's also maniacque, ‘mad, brain sick'--2024 gave lots of examples of maniacal behavior.
And the very apt excrement, which Cawdrey defined politely as ‘dung, offal, refuse, or dregs.’
But after due consideration, Cawdrey went with a word that seemed to sum up all that was wrong with 2024: gibbocitie, ‘crookedness.’
Another of the great lexicographers of the past, Nathaniel Bailey, whose Dictionarium Britannicum appeared in 1730, chose populate as his word of the year. Populate means the opposite of what you think it means: “to unpeople, or lay waste a Country.” Because so many people would be leaving the country, either voluntarily or by force.
Bailey adds that populate is “sometimes used, tho’ improperly, for to people a Country.” That’s what we think of when we hear the word populate today. But the earliest meaning of populate is indeed ‘to depopulate’ an area. It’s one of a select group of English words that mean both something and its opposite, like cleave, which means both ‘cling to, hold together’ and ‘cut apart, separate.’ Or dust, which can mean either ‘remove the dust from’ or ‘to add dust to’ something. And of course literally, which can mean ‘literally, according to the letter’ though more often it means the opposite, ‘figuratively.’
Samuel Johnson, author of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), picked catastrophe as his Word of the Year for 2024. He defined catastrophe as ‘A final event; a conclusion generally unhappy.’ We might go with something stronger for the definition now.
And Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer whose An American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, opted for dictatory, ‘dogmatical, overbearing,’ as his choice for the 2024 WOTY.
Last but not least is our Old English Word of the Year. Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, editors of An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, chose gríma, which means ‘nightmare,’ as their Old English word of the year for 2024.
Both grim and nightmare seem to sum up 2024 very well indeed, and so, along with all the other negative terms our lexicographers have chosen, the Web of Language picks gríma and its modern equivalent, nightmare, as the 2024 Words of the Year.
