Merrian-Webster announced yesterday that the word of the year is “authentic”.
Mike Cohen / CC
This is because there has apparently been a high volume of searches for the word’s definition for several years, but 2023 saw a “substantial increase,” thanks to “stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.”
This is a word with more than one meeting, including “not false or imitation” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.”
Another fan is Elon Musk, who has previously said that people should be more “authentic” on social media.
One of the other words to stand out in searches this year, according to the dictionary, was the closely related “deepfake.”
This is defined as “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”
In 2022, Merriam-Webster chose “gaslighting” as its word of the year, saying it had become a ubiquitous term in the “age of misinformation.”
Other words that led much traffic to the online dictionary in 2023 included coronation, dystopian, indict and doppelgänger.
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