In the age of fake news and misinformation abound across the internet, it may come as no surprise that Merriam-Webster deemed “gaslighting” its 2022 word of the year.
Calling the term a “driver of disorientation and mistrust,” Merriam-Webster saw a 1740% increase in searches for “gaslighting” this year, which it defines in part as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.”
“It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s unveiling. “It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year.”
The meaning of the word has expanded since it first emerged in the mid-20th century, attributed to a 1938 play written by Patrick Hamilton, appropriately called “Gas Light.” The play centers on Jack and Bella Manningham, a couple in 1880s London in which the former attempts to convince his wife she is going insane. Jack goes so far as to convince Bella she is imagining the gas-powered lights dimming each night inside their house, when in fact he is the cause of nightly darkness.
Merriam-Webster’s more lengthy definition of the term is the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”
The first known use of the term “gaslighting,” according to Merriam-Webster, was in 1961.
The dictionary’s word of the year is not necessarily one recently added to the English lexicon, but is rather a “statistical measure of what sent people to the dictionary in the past year.” While the word skyrocketed in Merriam-Webster’s search engines this year, “gaslight” has of late gained growing notoriety in popular culture across the board, and was a runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary’s word-of-the-year in 2018.
Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based solely on data. Sokolowski and his team weed out evergreen words most commonly looked up to gauge which word received a significant bump over the year before.
They don't slice and dice why people look up words, which can be anything from quick spelling and definition checks to some sort of attempt at inspiration or motivation. Some of the droves who looked up “gaslighting” this year might have wanted to know, simply, if it's one or two words, or whether it's hyphenated.
“Gaslighting,” Sokolowski said, spent all of 2022 in the top 50 words looked up on merriam-webster.com to earn top dog word of the year status.
Teresa Thuman, who directed an adaptation of the 1938 play in Seattle this past April, said the show’s themes of inequality and shifting power dynamics ring true to audiences in today’s political climate – possibly contributing to the word’s own increased use.
“Anyone who has experienced oppression and marginalization is told that it’s their problem that they see something differently,” Thuman told the Seattle Times earlier this year. “It’s true with climate change and it’s true with our government systems and our financial system, things that we see very clearly and then we’re given all kinds of reasons not to believe what we see.”
While the rise of misinformation on social media platforms has been of concern to lawmakers for years, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic put a sharp spotlight on the issue. One study from the Kaiser Family Foundation published last November found nearly 78% of Americans either believed or were not “sure about at least one of eight false statements about the COVID-19 pandemic or COVID-19 vaccines.”
Runners-up for Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-year also related to political topics around the globe, including the term “oligarch,” searches for which increased by 621% in early March, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine.
While its Greek roots translate to “rule by the few,” there is a specific definition in relation to individuals in Soviet Union-descended countries, in which a small group of individuals from an upper class privately acquire state assets and store those massive funds in offshore, foreign accounts so as to solidify power.
The United States and other countries were quick to sanction Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, ranging from his press secretary to family members to executives of top companies in the country.
The next runner-up was omicron, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet used by the World Health Organization to identify a variant of the COVID-19 virus. The international health agency announced the new variant almost exactly a year ago – on Nov. 26, 2021 – and has since grown to include hundreds of sub variants around the world.
But the SARS-CoV-2 virus was perhaps not as top-of-mind for Merriam-Webster searchers in 2022 as in the previous two years. In 2021, the dictionary deemed “vaccine” as its word-of-the-year; in 2020, the most-searched term was “pandemic.”
Other words that emerged as top searches this year included “codify,” when lookups increased 193% overall this year in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the federal right to an abortion. In the months since, President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats have pressured Congress to ensure abortion is protected under federal law.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.