But not just any ism. The top isms to earn high traffic spikes and big
bumps in lookups on the dictionary company's website in 2015 over the
year before are socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism,
capitalism and terrorism.
"We had a lot on our minds this year," mused Peter Sokolowski, the
Springfield, Massachusetts-based company's editor at large, in a recent
interview. "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices.
We're educating ourselves."
Pinpointing reasons why words go on the run at Merriam-Webster is an
educated guess. The dictionary company tracks corresponding news events
to link lookups to real life. And its researchers also crunch data in a
way that filters out common words frequently looked up year after year
after year when making their top annual choices.
Lookups for fascism corresponded to release of video in November showing
a white police officer shooting a black teenager in Chicago, and the
criminal charges that followed. Merriam-Webster also saw a stronger
correlation in heavy traffic on its site for that word and "fascist" and
flash points in Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign,
including reports on his anti-Islam rhetoric.
The isms often collide, driving each other in popularity, Sokolowski said.
The company began picking a word of the year in 2003. It went with "culture" in 2014.
This year's word of the year at Dictionary.com is identity. The folks at
Oxford Dictionaries went with a pictograph, an emoji called the "Face
with Tears of Joy."
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