Selfie, Science and Twerk: The English and American Premier Dictionaries Reveal Their Word of the Year Lists

showrooming, noun:
the practice of visiting a shop or shops in order to examine a product before buying it online at a lower price. [origin early 21st century: from showroom 'a room used to display goods for sale'.]

Before 2013, there were just a handful of examples of this on our corpus. We've seen this figure increase significantly, along with use of the related verb 'to showroom' (A survey last year found that 35 percent of shoppers had showroomed) and the noun 'showroomer' (Some retailers have tried to compete with showroomers by reducing prices).

twerk, verb:
dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. [origin 1990s: probably an alteration of work.]

Twerk seems to have arisen in the early 1990s, in the context of the bounce music scene in New Orleans. It's likely that the word was being used in clubs and at parties before that, as an exhortation to dancers. By the mid-1990s, we see evidence of twerk being used online in newsgroups to describe a specific type of dancing. The most likely theory about the origin of this word is that it is an alteration of work, because that word has a history of being used in similar ways, with dancers being encouraged to 'work it'. The 't' could be a result of blending with another word such as twist or twitch. By early 2013, the word had generated enough currency across a range of sources for us to add it to OxfordDictionaries.com; its association with Miley Cyrus this summer created a huge spike of usage in the media, especially social media.

Merriam-Webster Inc., America's leading dictionary publisher, has announced its top ten Words of the Year for 2013

This year's list was compiled by analyzing the top lookups in the online dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com and focusing on the words that showed the greatest increase in lookups this year as compared to last year. The results, based on approximately 100 million lookups a month, show that the words that prompted the most increased interest in 2013 were not new words or words used in headlines, but rather they were the words behind the stories in this year's news.

The Word of the Year, with the greatest increase in lookups, may surprise many people: science. "It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition," says Peter Sokolowski, Editor-at-Large at Merriam-Webster. "A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about 'phony' science, or whether science held all the answers. It's a topic that has great significance for us. And it fascinates us — enough so that it saw a 176% increase in lookups this year over last, and stayed a top lookup throughout the year."

Another top lookup that saw a significant increase in use was cognitive. The increased awareness regarding concussions in the NFL and NHL, as well as attention paid to traumatic brain injuries sustained by veterans, were big news stories in 2013. "People are not only interested in knowing more about how injuries affect cognitive function, but also how age and other factors affect cognitive function and development," says Sokolowski.

Users weren't solely looking up scientific vocabulary, however. Both rapport and communication saw huge increases in use this year. "Both are tied to an ongoing discussion about the NSA wiretapping program: what constitutes the 'private communications' monitored by the NSA, and does the wiretapping program hurt our rapport with foreign leaders?," says Kory Stamper, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster who monitors lookup statistics on Merriam-Webster.com. But the evidence also suggests another reason both words may have spiked. Stamper notes that user comments submitted to Merriam-Webster.com's Seen & Heard feature suggest that job-hunting dictionary users are looking up these words for use in their résumés.

Rounding out the top five lookups of the year is niche, a word many may assume is tied to product marketing or partisan politics. "Not so fast," says Stamper. "The spike in lookups may well be entirely related to the pronunciation of the word. Is it 'nitch' or 'neesh' or 'nish'?" Perhaps spurred on by a popular Web video on common mispronunciations, the lookups of niche were almost 140% higher this year than last. "It's a happy reminder that people do use the dictionary to check spellings and pronunciations of words," Stamper says.

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Selfie, Science and Twerk: The English and American Premier Dictionaries Reveal Their Word of the Year Lists

Merriam-Webster Inc., America's leading dictionary publisher, has announced its top ten Words of the Year for 2013

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