Homer became the top search after being the word of the day in the popular quizz Wordle, making it the word of the year
(Picture: Nick Ansell/PA)The Cambridge Dictionary has revealed the word of 2022 after many disgruntled Wordle players became stuck with the unfamiliar American English term.
The term “homer” has been announced as word of the year, referencing the sport baseball.
Not to be confused with the popular sitcom dad in The Simpsons, homer in fact refers to a home run in the popular American sport.
The word caused much confusion among Wordle players, halting many a winning streak when users were unable to correctly coin it.
It was searched around 75,000 times in the first week of May for the answer to the online five-letter word puzzle and became the dictionary’s highest-spiking word of the year.
How to use homer in a sentence
Relating to baseball, a homer is achieved when a batter is able to hit a home run - by hitting the ball far enough to allow teammates to run all the way around the bases. If they able to reach the home plate without being tagged out, the term homer comes into play.
If you’ve hit one out of the park, you have hit a homer, which is basically a home run.
No surprise that 95 per cent of searches for the word were from outside North America, where baseball is less popular.
The choice of word in the popular game caused much dismay among speakers of British English, with some reported being “furious” on social media.
Equally, Americans declared their dismay when they were stumped after “bloke” was used in another puzzle for the game.
Wordle success
The deceptively simple puzzle game Wordle has seen a huge rise in popularity since its launch in autumn 2021.
It was developed by Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer living in New York, who created the game for his puzzle-obsessed partner.
The once-a-day game invites players to try to guess a five-letter word in a similar fashion as the guess-the-colour game Mastermind.
A user has six attempts to crack the code, with the game announcing whether any of the chosen letters are in the secret word and whether they are in the correct place.
