Lists of Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year

During the twelve-month period that decides the word of the year, the term blog had the most requests for a definition or explanation, so a new entry was placed in Merriam-Webster's printed dictionary for 2005.

The other words on this list, such as incumbent, electoral, and partisan, were associated with major news events, such as the United States presidential election of 2004 or natural disasters that hit the US.

[10] Hurricane Katrina, the bird flu, and the death of Pope John Paul II renewed public interest in words such as refugee, tsunami, pandemic, conclave, and levee.

"[1] At number 10 is inept, a word that received a lot of attention after the days when President George W. Bush delivered a live prime time news conference that came to an awkward end when some television networks cut him off to return to their regularly scheduled programs.

[53] After online visitors chose truthiness in a five-to-one majority vote as the Word of the Year of 2006,[66] Merriam-Webster received a large amount of publicity.

[80] Spelled with two zeros in leetspeak, w00t reflects a new direction in the English language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text messaging.

[71] Founded in 2004, Facebook is a social network that allows its users to create a profile page and forge links with other friends and acquaintances.

Interest in the word reached its highest point around May 1,[105] the day the Greek government announced a series of austerity measures, but its popularity remained strong throughout the year.

Barack Obama used the word shellacking in November 2010, when acknowledging his party's losses in the US mid-term elections,[106] and lookups of ebullient peaked in October, as thirty-three Chilean miners were successfully rescued after 69 days trapped underground.

[108] Although the popularity of the word wasn't linked to any specific event, it received the greatest amount of interest in the latter half of the year, as the United States Congress introduced the Budget Control Act, and its Supercommittee began to craft deficit-reduction plans.

[109] Ambivalence was also a popular word throughout the year; John Moore, President of Merriam-Webster, remarked: "We think it reflects the public attitude toward a wide range of issues, including the economy, the ongoing debates in Washington, the presidential election, and most recently the race for the Republican Party nomination."

The term vitriol was used frequently in the wake of the January 2011 Tucson shooting, which led to a national debate about political rhetoric.

[111] The popularity of many of the words on Merriam-Webster's 2012 list were influenced by the commentary and debate that surrounded that year's US presidential election.

This was partly as a result of a new technology of the same name being announced by Disney Research; however, John Morse, President of Merriam-Webster, suggested that touché was "simply a word enjoying a period of increased popular use, perhaps as a byproduct of the growing amount of verbal jousting in our culture, especially through social media".

Amid the George Floyd protests of May 2020 and beyond, many Black Lives Matter supporters called on local governments to "defund the police", leading defund to have a 6,059% increase in lookups from 2019 to 2020;[126] ensuing national conversations about references to the American Civil War led to the country music trio formerly known as Lady Antebellum changing their name to Lady A, ensuing a similar 885% increase in lookups.

[130] A frequent entry in victorious US Presidential candidate Joe Biden's vocabulary, malarkey saw its second appearance in the top 10, the other being in 2012 during his re-election campaign for Vice President.

Doppelgänger saw multiple spikes from independent events, one of which was the release of the book Doppelganger by academic and activist Naomi Klein.

Searches for deadname increased due to the passage of anti-LGBT curriculum laws in several US states which prohibit or limit the mention or discussion of homosexuality and transgender identity in schools.