NEW YORK — In an age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence increased and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year for 2023 is “authentic.”
Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Searches for the word are routinely high on the dictionary company’s site but were pushed to new heights during the year, editor-in-chief Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
“We see a kind of authenticity crisis in 2023,” he said prior to the announcement of this year’s speech on Monday. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons why people go to dictionaries and websites looking for specific words. Instead, they hunt for the data on lookup spikes and world events associated with them. This time there was no particularly big impulse at any point, but a constancy in the increased interest in ‘authentic’.
This was certainly the year of artificial intelligence, but also a moment when ChatGPT maker OpenAI was experiencing a leadership crisis. Taylor Swift and Prince Harry strived for authenticity in their words and actions. Musk himself, at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, called on business leaders, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by managing their own accounts.
“Can we trust that a student wrote this article? Can we trust that a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We now recognize that authenticity is an achievement in itself.”
Merriam-Webster’s entry for “Authentic” is packed with meaning.
There is ‘not false or imitation: real, real’, as in an authentic cockney accent. There is talk of ‘being true to one’s own personality, mind or character’. There is “worthy of being accepted or believed as consistent with or based on facts.” It has been “made or done in the same manner as an original.” And perhaps most tellingly: ‘conforming to an original in order to reproduce essential features’.
‘Authentic’ follows 2022’s choice for ‘gaslighting’. And 2023 will mark twenty years since Merriam-Webster chose a top word.
The company’s data crunchers filter out evergreen words like “love” and “affect” versus “effect,” which always appear high in search results among the 500,000 words it defines online. This year, the wordsmiths also filtered out numerous five-letter words, as Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site to search for them while playing the daily games, Sokolowski said.
Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a slew of runners-up for word of the year, which have also attracted unusual traffic. These include “X” (searches increased in July following Musk’s rebranding of Twitter), “EGOT” (there was a boost in February when Viola Davis achieved rare four-time honoree status with a Grammy) and “Elemental” , the title of a new Pixar film whose searches jumped in June.
Rounding out the company’s key words for 2023, in no particular order:
RIZZ: Slang for “romantic attraction or charm” and apparently an abbreviation for charisma. Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it has been among the top searches ever since, Sokolowski said.
KIBBUTZ: There was a huge spike in searches for “a communal farm or settlement in Israel” after Hamas militants attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7. The first kibbutz in Israel was founded around 1909.
IMPLODE: The June 18 implosion of the Titan submarine during a commercial expedition to explore the wreck of the Titanic sent searches skyrocketing for this word, which means “to burst inward.” “It was a story that completely consumed the world,” Sokolowski said.
DEADNAME: Interest was high in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name a transgender person is given at birth and no longer uses during transition.” Lookups followed a flurry of legislation aimed at restricting LGBTQ+ rights across the country.
DOPPELGANGER: Sokolowski calls this “a word lover’s word.” Merriam-Webster defines it as a “doppelgänger,” an “alter ego,” or a “ghostly counterpart.” It comes from German folklore. Interest in the word surrounded Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” released this year. She uses her own experience of often being confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a broader story about the crazy times we all live in.
CORONATIONS: King Charles III had one on May 6, boosting searches for the word by 15,681% from the year before, Sokolowski said. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of coronation.”
DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company’s definition is “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.” Interest increased after Musk’s lawyers said in a Tesla lawsuit that he was often the subject of deepfake videos and again after Ryan Reynolds’ likeness appeared in a fake, AI-generated Tesla ad.
DYSTOPIAN: Climate chaos sparked interest in the word. This also applied to books, films and TV shows that were intended to entertain. “It’s unusual for me to see a word used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.
COVENANT: Searches for the word meaning “a generally formal, solemn, and binding agreement” increased on March 27, following a deadly mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter was a former student who was killed by police after killing three students and three adults.
Interest also increased with the release this year of “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s highly anticipated new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which Oprah Winfrey selected as a book club pick.
More recently, shortly after U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson ascended to Speaker of the House of Representatives, a 2022 interview with the Louisiana congressman recirculated. He discussed how his teenage son was then his “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when porn or other potentially offensive sites are viewed.
INDICT: Former President Donald Trump has been charged with misdemeanor charges in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, DC, in addition to fighting a lawsuit that threatens his real estate empire.