by NEW YORK (AP) – In the age of deep truth and post-truth, as artificial intelligence rises and Elon Musk turns Twitter into X, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”
Authentic art. An authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Searches for the word are regularly heavy on the dictionary company’s site, but they were added to new heights during the year, editor-in-chief Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
“We see that kind of crisis of authenticity in 2023,” he said before this year’s word was announced on Monday. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
Sokolowski and his team do not examine why people go to dictionaries and websites to look up specific words. Instead, they search for the data on search spikes and correlated global events. This time around, there was no particularly large rise at any particular time but a consistency with the increased interest in “authentic.”
This was the year of artificial intelligence, certainly, but also a time when OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, suffered a leadership crisis. Taylor Swift and Prince Harry pursued authenticity in their words and actions. Musk himself, at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, urged company leaders, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts.
“Can we trust that a student wrote this paper? Can we trust that a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “Sometimes we don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is expression.”
The Merriam-Webster entry for “authentic” is busy with meaning.
There is “neither false nor fake: real, actual,” as in the vernacular of cockerels. It is “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.” It is “worth accepting or believing to be in accordance with or based on fact.” It is “made or made in the same manner as an original.” And, perhaps most significantly, is “sticking to the original to reproduce essential features.”
“Authentic” follows the 2022 option of “stem lighting.” And 2023 is Merriam-Webster’s 20th anniversary of selecting keywords.
The company’s data crunchers sift through evergreen words like “love” and “influence” vs. “effect” is always high in searches among the 500,000 words it defines online. This year, the wordsmiths also filtered out several five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site to search for them while playing the daily games, Sokolowski said.
Sokolowski, a lexicologist, has plenty of runners-up for the word of the year that also attracted unusual traffic. Among them are “X” (trackers that surfaced in July after Musk’s Twitter rebrand), “EGOT” (February boomed when Viola Davis achieved that quadruple Grammy award status) and “Elemental,” the title of his new Pixar movie that had searches jumping in June.
Rounding out the company’s key words of 2023, in no particular order:
RIZZ: Slang for “romantic attraction or charm” and shorthand for charisma Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and has been among the top candidates since, said Sokolowski.
KIBBUTZ: There was a huge spike in searches for a “community farm or settlement in Israel” after the Hamas militia attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7. The first kibbutz in Israel was established around 1909.
IMPLODE: The June 18 eruption of the Titanic sunk a commercial cruise to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, sending searches skyrocketing for this word, which means “explode in.” “It was a story that completely touched the world,” Sokolowski said.
DEADNAME: There has been a lot of interest in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transition.” Searches took place after legislation aimed at LGBTQ+ rights was curtailed across the country.
DOPPEL GANGER: Sokolowski calls this a “lover’s word”. Merriam-Webster defines it as a “double,” “alter ego” or “ghost counterpart.” It originates from German folklore. There has been buzz around Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which was released this year. She uses her own experience of being often confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a broader narrative about the crazy times we all live in.
CORONATION: King Charles III had one on May 6, sending searches for the word up 15,681% in the previous year, Sokolowski said. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of crowning.”
DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company’s definition is “an image or recording that has been altered and convincingly manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not done or said.” Interest grew after Musk’s lawyers in Tesla’s lawsuit said he is often the subject of in-depth videos and repeatedly after the likes of Ryan Reynolds appeared in a fake AI-generated Tesla ad.
DYSTOPIAN: Climatic chaos made the word interesting. So did books, movies and television fare that aim to entertain. “It’s unusual for me to see a word used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.
Covenant: Searches for the word meaning “a formal, solemn and usually binding agreement” spiked on March 27, following the deadly mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter was a former student who was killed by police after killing three students and three adults.
This year’s release of “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which was selected by Oprah Winfrey as a book club selection, also generated interest.
Later, soon after United States Representative Mike Johnson ascended to the speakership of the House, an interview was rescheduled in 2022 with the congressman from Louisiana. He discussed how his teenage son became an “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when porn or other potentially inappropriate sites are viewed.
INDICTMENT: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, DC, as well as a lawsuit he fought threatening his real estate empire.
