Dictionary.com has revealed that ‘woman’ is the 2022 Word of the Year after searches for the word increased more than 1,400 percent.
“It’s a word that’s inseparable from the story of 2022,” Dictionary.com said, adding that searches for the word spiked “significantly multiple times” in relation to separate high-profile events.
The Dictionary.com said the word woman is one of the oldest words in the English language and “one that’s fundamental not just to our vocabulary but to who we are as humans.”
According to Dictionary.com, during the “height of the lookups for ‘woman’ in 2022”, searches for the word increased more than 1,400 per cent, which is a “massive leap for such a common word”.
Also, it said the biggest spike in search happened at the end of March 2022, during the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice in April.
The Dictionary.com official definition of woman is “an adult female person.” Yet, the word of the year announcement was more cautious: “Our selection of woman as our 2022 Word of the Year reflects how the intersection of gender, identity, and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary.”
