‘Science’ tops the list as Merriam-Webster’s 2013 word of the year

Merriam-Webster Dictionary released their top 10 Word of the Year 2013 list today, and the number one position is held by a word very near and dear to my heart — science!

Now, this isn't just an arbitrary choice. The heartening part of this news is that the list is populated using the roughly 100 million searches done on the online dictionary's website, with the top 10 words seeing the greatest increase in 'lookups' over the past year.

"It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition," Peter Sokolowski, Editor-at-Large at Merriam-Webster said in a statement. "A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about 'phony' science, or whether science held all the answers. It's a topic that has great significance for us. And it fascinates us — enough so that it saw a 176% increase in lookups this year over last, and stayed a top lookup throughout the year."

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Other words that made the list for this year: cognitive, rapport, communication, niche, ethic, paradox, visceral, integrity and metaphor. Some, like 'niche', are likely there based on people looking up pronunciation, but according to Merriam-Webster, it's what was in the news that drove most of the hits.

What did Oxford University Press name as their 2013 word of the year? 'Selfie'. They base their list on the same criteria as Merriam-Webster, but regardless of the fact that I took a selfie for the image at the top of this post, I still have to go with Merriam-Webster's choice.

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(Photo by S. Sutherland)

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