Online dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com choose their words of the year based on the frequency of lookups. As a result, Merriam-Webster picked 'feminism', and Dictionary,com picked 'complicit'.
The Oxford Dictionaries opted for a different, but a lot more complicated process. The online dictionary chooses its word of the year by selecting which popular word in 2017 that captured "the zeitgeist, that defining spirit or mood of the moment", as President of Dictionaries Casper Grathwohl explained in a blog post.
The word has to be a term that embodies not only the social and political change of the past year but also reflects the change in the way people use languages.
As a result, Oxford Dictionaries 2017 Word of the Year is 'Youthquake', a word that defines "a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people".
Lexicographers who harnessed a huge amount of data to get to this conclusion, all after seeing an increase to up to 400 percent n the usage of "youthquake" in 2017 if compared to 2016.
YOUTHQUAKE is the Oxford Dictionaries #WordOfTheYear 2017. Find out more: https://t.co/BanfCMh2Gi pic.twitter.com/iIQ4ykwUwa
— Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) December 14, 2017
A surge of young voters contributed to the surprise performance of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the snap election called by Prime Minister Theresa May in April.
The word was also used in New Zealand in September to discuss young people’s engagement in politics.
The word was first coined by Diana Vreeland, a former editor-in-chief of Vogue, in 1965, to describe a year of tumultuous change and the birth of youth culture sweeping first from England to France, and then the U.S..
Grathwohl calls it a word "we can all rally behind" and "imbued with hope".
While the word has significant engagement to some people and in culture, most people online have never heard or see that word.
