The words of the year for 2024 are:
Brain rot: Oxford University Press’s word of the year for 2024, selected from a shortlist of six words through a combination of public vote and language analysis. The word reflects the growing concern about the impact of virtual life and how people use their free time.
Polarization: The word means “division in two sharply distinct opposites,” according to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2024.
Manifest: Manifest (verb) to use methods such as visualization (= picturing something in your mind) and affirmation (= repeating positive phrases) to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen. Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
‘Brat’, newly defined in 2024 as ‘characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude’, has been named Collins’ Word of the Year 2024. Inspired by the Charli XCX album, ‘brat’ has become one of the most talked about words of 2024. More than a hugely successful album, ‘brat’ is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and ‘brat summer’ established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life. Collin’s Dictionary’s Word of the Year
‘Kakistocracy’, is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally “ … The Economist’s word of the year for 2024
‘Demure’, The word demure experienced a meteoric rise in usage in 2024. Between January and the end of August, this term saw a nearly 1200% increase in usage in digital web media alone. This sharp rise is mainly attributed to TikToker Jools Lebron’s popularization of the phrase “very demure, very mindful” in a series of videos posted to the platform in early August. Dictionary.com word of the year
‘Connection’, Psych Central defines human connection as “the sense of closeness and belongingness a person can experience when having supportive relationships with those around them. Connection is when two or more people interact with each other, and each person feels valued, seen, and heard.” Medium
Oxford University Press shortlist for Word of the Year
What word best encapsulates the year 2024?
Oxford University Press has whittled the answer down to six candidates.
This year’s shortlist for the Oxford Word of 2024 includes references to ticketing scandals, TikTok trends and fiction-book genres.
The shortlisted words will now be put to the public, before the winner is announced on 2 December.
What are the candidates?
- Lore: A body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes relating to someone or something
- Brain rot: Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging
- Dynamic pricing: The practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions
- Demure: Of a person: reserved or restrained in appearance or behaviour. Of clothing: not showy, ostentatious, or overly revealing.
- Slop: Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate
- Romantasy: A genre of fiction combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure alongside a central romantic storyline.
Cambridge shortlist for Word of the Year
These strong contenders for Word of the Year didn’t make the cut. Here’s why.
brat: Brat was everywhere in the summer of 2024 thanks to Charli XCX’s album of the same name (and its vibrant green cover), and it spiked in lookups on the Cambridge Dictionary. A brat is a child who misbehaves – who doesn’t conform to social expectations for behaviour. However, although using this term as an adjective (Charlie XCX called Kamala Harris brat, not a brat) is linguistically interesting, flipping a negative term to use it in a defiantly positive way is not an uncommon way we use language, and it doesn’t yet amount to a new meaning that would be entered in the dictionary.
ecotarian: Another word that spiked in 2024 lookups, ecotarian reflects the growing movement towards environmentally conscious living. But we could not connect the term to anything that felt uniquely characteristic of 2024.Other words we’re watching
To be a candidate for the Word of the Year, a term has to actually be in the Cambridge Dictionary. Some words are added very quickly: for example, it took just 34 days to add Covid-19 to the dictionary. But often, we find new words or senses that we want to keep an eye on and make sure they “stick” – that they’re not going to disappear as quickly as they appeared (like Swiftonomics) and that they’re not just used in very specific contexts (like WaterTok). In May 2023, we noticed that the newer sense of manifest had stood the test of time and was now being used extensively in many contexts, so we added it to the dictionary.
Here are some words we’ve begun tracking in 2024:
quishing: the scam of phishing via QR code. We haven’t seen this being looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary, but other sources we monitor showed a spike in late February 2024 followed by another, more steady rise since August.
resenteeism: to continue doing your job but resent it. This blend of resent and absenteeism is appearing in business journalism. We will monitor it to see whether it expands into general use, the way quiet quitting did.
gymfluencer: a social media influencer whose content is focused on fitness or bodybuilding. This is another blend, of gym and influencer. Blending is a common way that new terms are coined, but many are short-lived.
cocktail party problem (also cocktail party effect): the difficulty of focusing on one voice when there are multiple speakers in the room. This was coined in the 1950s, but was mainly used in academic texts related to audiology. It is now being used with reference to AI. This is a good example of words coming from specialized subject areas beginning to spread into new contexts.
vampire: a vampire device or vampire appliance is one which uses energy even when not in use. This is a new, adjective sense of an existing word. Lexicographers noticed this sense when compiling another new sense of vampire added to the Cambridge Dictionary in October.
resilience: At 152,000 overall lookups, resilience scored even higher than manifest did. It’s a powerful word, reflecting the strength and adaptability needed in challenging times. However, there is not much to stay about it linguistically.
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