Following a year of rising political tensions that are much due to the climate leading up to and proceeding the US presidential election, in which the country has been starkly divided in support for each candidate, Merriam-Webster’s chosen word of 2024 is “polarization.”
The result of the election has left Americans with considerably different outlooks, with many of those who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris feeling Donald Trump’s re-election poses significant threats to the country. Even prior to the election results, many voters on both ends went to the polls feeling the opposing candidate would jeopardize the United States’s future. According to AP VoteCast, in a survey of more than 120,000 voters, about 8 in 10 Kamala Harris voters were very or somewhat concerned that Donald Trump’s views– but not Harris’s–were too extreme, while about 7 in 10 Trump voters felt the same way about Harris, but not Trump.
Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million page views a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based on data, tracking a rise in search and usage. Its entry for ‘polarization’ reflects its most commonly used scientific and metaphorical definitions, used to mean “causing strong disagreement between opposing factions or groupings.”
“Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s senior editor, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.”
“The basic job of the dictionary is to tell the truth about words,” the Merriam-Webster editor continued. “We’ve had dictionaries of English for 420 years and it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that we’ve actually known which words people look up.”
He noted that “polarization” is a “pretty young word” in the scheme of the English language, as it originated in the early 1800s rather than during the Renaissance, when many words with Latin roots about science were created. “Polarized is a term that brings intensity to another word,” he continued, most frequently used in the U.S. to describe race relations, politics and ideology.
Last year, the word of the year was “authentic,” while 2024’s pick seems to reflect growing ideological divisions between people in the country.
“It’s always been important to me that the dictionary serve as a kind of neutral and objective arbiter of meaning for everybody,” Sokolowski said. “It’s a kind of backstop for meaning in an era of fake news, alternative facts, whatever you want to say about the value of a word’s meaning in the culture.”
Rounding out the rest of Merriam-Webster’s top 10 words of 2024 are “demure,” “fortnight,” “totality,” “resonate,” “allision,” “weird,” “cognitive,” “pander,” and “democracy.”
