Word nerds unite every January 9 and choose carefully their, well, words.
While the origins of this holiday are unknown, many celebrate it with crosswords and other word puzzles.
Jazz up your vocabulary with these 5 words of the year for 2024:
1. BRAIN ROT – Oxford’s choice following two weeks of public voting. Brain rot is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
2. POLARIZATION – Merriam-Webster’s defines its choice as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” The polar in polarization is from Latin polaris, which describes the Earth’s poles.
3. DEMURE – Dictionary.com’s lexicographers analyzed a large amount of data, including newsworthy headlines, trends on social media, and search engine results, among others to identify words that made an impact on conversations. It said the word demure “experienced a meteoric rise in usage” in 2024, mainly attributed to TikToker Jools Lebron’s viral phrase “very demure, very mindful.”
4. MANIFEST — Cambridge Dictionary chose this word which is now popularly used to mean “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen”.
5. BRAT – Defined in 2024 as “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude,” it was chosen by Collins’ Dictionary as its word of the year. The decision was inspired by the hit album of Charli XCX.
