Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and I'm here today with John Kelly, formerly from Dictionary.com, previously the vice president of editorial and was in charge of the word of the year decisions there. And so we are going to talk all about words of the year for 2024.

John Kelly, welcome to the Grammar Girls podcast. Thank you so much for having me back.

And I'm so happy to talk about everyone's favorite compound plural, words of the year.

I know. I know. It's so, it's such a fun time of year to have all these wordy discussions. Can you tell us? So one really interesting comment I got from a follower, I think it was on threads who said, I can't believe the dictionaries can never agree on what the word of the year is. And I thought, well, I think they kind of try to be each be different.. So can you talk sort of in general about how these words get chosen?

That is a great observation from one of your users.

Dictionaries in general follow a similar pattern.

They look for four criteria to make their selection of word of the year.

Lookup data.

What words were looked up in some significantly larger way over the course of the past year. Cultural trends, this one absolutely

matters. Does the word reflect major events defined that year? We're talking about the past year

after all.

Lexical trends. Lexical trends. Was the word, is the word lexically or word wise interesting in some way? Is there something about that word that reveals what's happening in language?

And finally, resonance. Does it land with the user? Can they sit back and go, oh yeah, that really was 2024? Some years, there is overlap. In 2020, Dictionary.com and Miriam Webster both chose pandemic. How could you not?

Yeah, that was a year.

That was the year.

And other dictionaries reflected similar words.

In prior years, some of the dictionaries,

especially British and Australian ones,

they aligned on climate-related words.

In general, dictionaries get different data. So different look-up

data surfaces. And of course, dictionaries do want love in this world, and it can be important

for them to make sure that there is a choice that stands out against their beloved collegial competitors. So why are dictionaries getting different data? That is a choice that stands out against their beloved collegial competitors.

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