In a nod to the growing use of gender-inclusive pronouns, Merriam-Webster named “they” as its 2019 Word of the Year. The English language famously lacks a gender-neutral pronoun, and lookups for “they” on the dictionary’s search site spiked 313 percent this year, reflecting greater use of the pronoun in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily conversations.
The dictionary’s top lookups often related to the news cycle, and many of the words people searched for related to the current impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump abused the power of his office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals by withholding military aid approved by Congress.
The term “quid pro quo” — something given or received for something else — was used by newscasters, pundits, politicians and even the president himself on countless occasions, for a year-over-year increase in lookups of 644 percent.
The use of the Latin word dates to the late 16th century to refer to times when an apothecary substituted one medicine for another, either by accident or fraud. In its now-obsolete apothecary sense, “quid pro quo” took on the more general meaning of a substitution. Today, it’s most often used in legal contexts.
People were also curious about the various meanings of the word “impeach,” and lookups spiked 129 percent after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, announced the impeachment inquiry on Sept. 24. “Impeach,” for the record, means “to charge with a crime or misdemeanor” and “to cast doubt on.” It’s the former definition that carries an additional meaning, “to charge (a public official) before a competent tribunal with misconduct in office”; the latter means “to challenge the credibility or validity of.”
People weren’t just looking to the dictionary for guidance on how not to offend their non-binary friends and relatives or to understand the ongoing impeachment proceedings in Washington. Some were genuinely confused.
Here’s an example: What exactly is a “crawdad”?
Delia Owens, whose debut novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” shot to the top of The New York Times Bestseller List, brought the term to literary prominence in March when she was interviewed for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
People living west of the Appalachians typically use “crawdad” when talking about the aquatic animal that looks like a miniature lobster and lives in rivers and streams, and which most people call “crawfish” or “crayfish.”
And blame a bit of confusion on, some say, the pretentiousness of Ohio State University, which in August filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent Office to start branding its logos “The Ohio State University.” Searches for the word “the,” one of the oldest words in English, spiked about 500 percent around the time of the announcement of the new branding.
If you want to be precise, “the” is pronounced “thuh” before words that begin with constanants, as in “the governor,” but “thee” with words that begin with a vowel, and for emphasis or to suggest uniqueness. So it works either way for The Ohio State University.
Notable colleges that use “the” in their names include The Catholic University of America, The College of William and Mary, and The George Washington University.
Some other lookups that spiked with the news cycle:
“Egregious,” meaning “conspicuously bad”: Lookups for this word increased 450 percent after reports that a Boeing pilot had used the word to describe an issue with 737 Boeing MAX planes, which were involved in two crashes that killed 346 people.
“Clemency,” meaning the “willingness or ability to moderate the severity of a punishment” and “an act or instance of mercy, compassion or forgiveness”: In January, the governor of Tennessee granted clemency to Cyntoia Brown, a woman serving a life sentence after, at age 16, she murdered a man who was holding her as a sex trafficking victim. In Brown’s case, the governor reduced her sentence to 15 years, the amount of time she had already served.
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“Snitty” became a top lookup in May — increasing by 150,000 percent — when Attorney General William Barr so described Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to him criticizing Barr’s summary of the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. Merriam-Webster defines “snitty” as “disagreeably ill-tempered.”
Mueller had used the word “exculpate,” to clear from alleged fault or guilt, in his July testimony before the House of Representatives, and the word saw a dramatic, 23,000 percent increase in lookups. In the testimony, Mueller said Trump “was not exculpated” by his report.