Merriam-Webster's word of the year

Uttered by politicians, TV hosts, and reality dating show contestants, the WOTY was one of the most searched terms of 2022.

Uttered by politicians, television hosts, and even reality dating show contestants, this year's WOTY has been one of the most searched terms of 2022.

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022 was so widely used it has been uttered by politicians, TV talking heads and even the bickering contestants of reality dating show “Bachelor in Paradise.” The word? Gaslighting.

According to Merriam-Webster, the word is defined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” It was one of the most searched words every day this year, said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. There wasn’t any one news event that caused the increase in searches, Sokolowski said. It’s just that people are hearing it more on TV and seeing it in newspapers and on social media. “It sends them to the dictionary,” he said.

The meaning of gaslighting has evolved over the years, Sokolowski said.

Its original definition, the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts,” came from the 1938 play “Gas Light” and the films that came after it. The plot involves a husband who tries to make his wife believe she is going insane by telling her that the gas lights in the house aren’t dimming, even though they are.

Now, it is used “as a fancy way to say lying,” said Sokolowski. “You’re losing a little bit of the subtlety of that original meaning of the word. But that’s the way language works. People adopt it and the word simply takes its own life.” Other words that drew high interest this year included Omicron, which saw a spike in searches in January when cases of the Covid-19 variant surged, Merriam-Webster said. Queen consort jumped in September after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II died and King Charles III’s wife Camilla was given the title.

Popular word games sent people to the dictionary, too. Searches for loamy, which describes a type of soil, surged in August when it was one of the answers for Quordle, a spinoff of the viral Wordle game.

Sokolowski said Merriam-Webster chooses its word of the year based on an increase in search from the year before.

The words of the year for the previous two years were both Covid-19 related: pandemic in 2020 and vaccine in 2021.