Was 2016 a dream or a nightmare? Try something in between: “surreal,” which is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, unveiled yesterday.
Meaning “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” or “unbelievable, fantastic,” the word joins Oxford’s “post-truth” and Dictionary.com’s “xenophobia” as the year’s top choices.
“It just seems like one of those years,” Merriam-Webster editor at large Peter Sokolowski said.
The company tracks year-over-year growth and spikes in lookups of words on its Web site to come up with the top choice. This time around, there were many periods of interest in “surreal” throughout the year, often in the aftermath of tragedy, Sokolowski said.
Major spikes came after the Brussels attack in March and again in July, after the Bastille Day massacre in Nice and the attempted coup in Turkey. All three received huge attention around the globe and had many in the media reaching for “surreal” to describe both the physical scenes and the “mental landscapes,” Sokolowski said.
The single biggest spike in lookups came last month, he said, specifically Nov. 9, the day Donald Trump went from candidate to US president-elect.
There were also smaller spikes, including after the death of Prince in April at age 57 and after the June shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Irony mixed with the surreal for yet another bump after the March death of Garry Shandling. His first sitcom, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, premiered on Showtime in 1986 and had him busting through the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience and mimicking his real life as a standup comedian, but one who knew he was starring in a TV show.
“It was surreal and it’s connected to the actual original meaning of surreal, which is to say it comes from Surrealism, the artistic movement of the early 20th century,” Sokolowski said.
Which is to say that “surreal” did not exist as a word until around 1924, after a group of European poets, painters and filmmakers founded a movement they called Surrealism. They sought to access the truths of the unconscious mind by breaking down rational thought.
It was not until 1937 that “surreal” began to exist on its own, said Sokolowski, who is a lexicographer.
Merriam-Webster first started tracking lookup trends in 1996, when the dictionary landed online. In 2001, after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the US, the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company noticed plenty of spikes in word lookups.
The most enduring spike was for “surreal,” pointing to a broader meaning and greater usage, Sokolowski said.
“We noticed the same thing after the Newtown shootings, after the Boston Marathon bombings, after Robin Williams’ suicide,” he said. “Surreal has become this sort of word that people seek in moments of great shock and tragedy.”
Word folk like Sokolowski can’t pinpoint exactly why people look words up online, but they know it is not only to check spellings or definitions. Right after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US, words that included “rubble” and “triage” spiked, he said.
A couple of days after that, more political words took over in relation to the tragedy, including “jingoism” and “terrorism.”
“But then we finally hit ‘surreal,’ so we had a concrete response, a political response and finally a philosophical response,” Sokolowski said. “That’s what connects all these tragic events.
Other words included in Merriam-Webster’s Top 10 for this year are:
Bigly: Yes, it is a word, but a rare and sometimes archaic form of “big,” dating to about 1400, Sokolowski said.
It made its way into the collective mind thanks to Trump, who was fond of using “big league” as an adverb, but making it sound like bigly.
Irregardless: It’s considered a “nonstandard” word for regardless. It is best avoided, Sokolowski said.
Irregardless was used during the calling of the last game of the World Series and its use was pilloried on social media, he said.
Icon: This spike came after Prince’s death on April 21, along with surreal.
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