Ever since the American Dialect Society selected a Word of the Year at its conference in 1990, over half a dozen English dictionaries have anointed an annual word or phrase that’s meant to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the prior year.
In 2003, the publisher of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary began bestowing a crown. On Dec. 9, 2024, it selected “polarization” as its word of the year, which joins a list of 2024 winners from other dictionaries that includes “brat,” “manifest,” “demure,” “brain rot” and “enshittification.”
