Merriam-Webster dictionary announces its word of the year

The publisher decided that "authentic" is the term that best encompasses these past 12 months, as figures like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift have shown.

Imagen de un diccionario de Merriam-Webster, el organismo que decidió que — (Flickr)

Published by

Rosana Rábago Sainz

27 de noviembre, 2023

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This Monday, the Merriam-Webster dictionary revealed the word of the year for 2023. The American publisher, best known for its dictionaries, decided that "authentic" is the word that best encompasses these past 12 months.

The reason? Their statement claimed it was due to the increase in searches for this word during the year, especially related to "stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media." Not only that, as editor Peter Sokolowski told the AP, there seems to be a crisis regarding authenticity in recent years and, for this reason, it is more taken into account:

We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity. What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more. Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore. We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.

In addition, it is a word that, per senior Merriam-Webster officials, is increasingly valued by public figures such as Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. Musk has been advocating for more than a year for people to be more "authentic" on social media. Meanwhile, other singers of Swift's stature, such as Lainey Wilson and Sam Smith, have defended the need to use their "authentic voice" as well as be their "authentic self."

Other words looked up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary

This word is also closely linked to another of the terms of the year: "deepfake." Here, authenticity is once again valued when there exists a technology that creates fake faces and voices using artificial intelligence.

Along with "authentic" and "deepfake", other terms chosen by Merriam-Webster that symbolize 2023 are "rizz" (defined as "romantic attractiveness or charm,") "fake," "coronation," "dystopian," "EGOT" (verb that describes the distinction obtained by certain artists who win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and a Tony), "X " (referring to the social network), "implode," "doppelgänger," "covenant," "indict," "elemental," "kibbutz" and "deadname" (a term referring to bills on "parental rights").