December 7, 2009
Merriam-Webster’s 2009 Word of the Year: Admonish
In my last post, I wrote about how the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” its 2009 Word of the Year. Well, apparently there is more than one “Word of the Year,” and Merriam-Webster recently announced that “admonish” tops its annual Words of the Year list. This list is based on actual user lookups to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Thesaurus.
Admonish, which means “to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner,” gained popularity when Congress voted to admonish U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at President Obama during a televised speech last September. Scores of people who were unfamiliar with the term went to the Internet to find its meaning.
Most of the top 10 terms can be tied to significant news events this year: The word “emaciated” made the list because so many people looked it up after it was used to describe the condition of Michael Jackson’s body after his death in June. The word “rogue” sparked a good deal of interest as a result of the November release of Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue.” And the word “philanderer” was looked up frequently due to news stories about indiscretions by Rep. Mark Sanford and talk show host David Letterman (and it’s probably still being looked up a lot these days thanks to Tiger Woods).
Here are the 10 most looked-up words on merriam-webster.com this year:
- admonish (verb): to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner
- emaciated (adjective): wasted away physically
- empathy (noun): the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
- furlough (noun): a leave of absence from duty granted especially to a soldier
- inaugurate (verb): to induct into an office with suitable ceremonies
- nugatory (adjective): of little or no consequence
- pandemic (adjective): occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population
- philanderer (noun): of a man: to have casual or illicit sex with a woman or with many women; especially: to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife
- repose (verb): to lay at rest
- rogue (adjective): resembling or suggesting a rogue elephant especially in being isolated, aberrant, dangerous, or uncontrollable
Filed by rebecca at 10:17 pm under For the love of words
I find this sad. I know it will make me sound snobby, but I can’t believe so many people didn’t know these simple words! Although I guess nugatory isn’t a really common word, and pandemic might be one they were looking up to see what exactly makes up a pandemic in numbers (because of H1N1). Also, it could have been a large percentage of non-English people who weren’t sure of the definitions. I don’t know.
I’m curious as to why people were looking up some of the words, like emaciated, or rogue. That’s an interestingly specific definition for rogue.
I agree with Steph; many of these words are basic, though nugatory would be an exception. Moreover, I’m not quite a fan of the definition that m-w.com gives for empathy:
empathy (noun): the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
Since when is empathy imaginative? I think Wikipedia does a far better job defining this word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
I thought that too, Steph, but then I realized that maybe people weren’t looking up the words solely for their definitions. When I’m writing, I look up a lot of very common terms in order to find their origins, synonyms, and antonyms. (Although I don’t use M-W; I swear by The Free Dictionary by Farlex: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/.)
I just looked up “rogue” on m-w.com and found two additional definitions for the adjective:
2. corrupt, dishonest
3. of or being a nation whose leaders defy international law or norms of international behavior
Now, these are a bit broader than the “elephant” definition!
Hi, Melissa -
I confess that I did not know the definition of “nugatory” before I wrote this post. In fact, I don’t think I had ever heard the word before! Is it tied to some 2009 event that I somehow missed out on?
Anyway, thank you for sharing that definition of empathy; I also prefer it to m-w.com’s.
I can’t think of a 2009 event that would lead to “nugatory” becoming one of the top ten words. It seems pretty random to me, but I’m sure there’s a good explanation for it.