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How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part four)
We mentioned in our previous blog that mini-budget was the only word not related to the death of Queen Elizabeth II among the top ten words in our corpus that were significantly more frequent in September than the preceding months.
Taking place on 23 September 2022, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-budget” sparked a series of economic events that were quickly called a doom loop—our word for October.
The term doom loop dates back to at least the 1980s in reference to a self-perpetuating downward spiral (broadly synonymous with vicious cycle). It is still often used in this sense. Examples in the corpus include:
However, the term is increasingly used in economic contexts, as was the case last year. Usage of the word dramatically spiked in October 2022, largely with reference to the consequences of the UK government’s mini-budget in September. For example:
In this context, doom loop was almost eight times more frequent in October 2022 than at the same time the previous year. Other words related to doom loop that also spiked include mini-budget, gilt, unfunded, anti-growth, and Trussonomics, a word very occasionally used before 2022 but which shot up in prominence last year.
Moving onto November 2022, we saw the global spectacle that was the FIFA Men’s World Cup.
The tournament—eventually won by Argentina following a 3-3 draw and dramatic penalty shoot-out against France—was not without controversies. This included the treatment of migrant workers working to build the infrastructure for the competition and the treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Qatar, the host nation.
Our word for November is OneLove, a term that started life as the name of an anti-discrimination campaign by the Dutch Football Association in 2020. It is synonymous with rainbow-coloured armbands worn by team captains bearing its logo.
Before September 2022, the word did not have much of a presence in our corpus, but its prominence skyrocketed in November as the tournament drew nearer and attention towards anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the host nation grew.
In particular, the word was associated with reports that some teams planned to wear the OneLove armbands during games as a sign of protest, but this was abandoned after a very late warning from the governing body that any players doing so would be given a yellow card.
Last year’s severe weather events were not limited to the summer. The UK experienced heavy snow and freezing temperatures in December, and 10 days later across the pond a huge winter storm swept over large parts of the US and Canada.
This led to a large spike in use of the term bomb cyclone. Our word for December, bomb cyclone was over 23 times more frequent in December 2022 than December 2021.
The term dates to at least the early 2000s. For instance:
Before that, use of the word bomb to refer to a rapidly-developing, severe storm can be traced back to the 1940s:
The first use of bomb in a more specific weather sense—describing a rapidly developing severe storm in which barometric pressure at the centre of the storm drops by at least 24 millibars over a 24-hour period at or north of 60˚ latitude—appeared in 1980, in a paper written by Frederick Sanders and John R. Gyakum (“Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the ‘Bomb’”, Monthly Weather Review, October 1980).
Although the bomb cyclone is not a new phenomenon, the effects of climate change have led extreme weather events such as this to increase in frequency and severity, where previously they might have been once-in-a-generation occurrences.
December’s North American winter storm arrived on the heels of COP27 in November, an international climate conference which focused on ways to adapt to a changing global environment. Discussions of climate justice, climate reparations, and loss and damage also resulted in an increase in the usage of those terms.
And that concludes our look back at 2022 in words. It was certainly an eventful year and through it all our ever-changing language helped us to make sense of the world around us and brought us together. At Oxford University Press we continue to monitor the English language—we look forward to seeing what trends emerge this year…
Catch up with part one, part two, and part three of the Word of the Year 2022 blog series.
How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part three)
From booster to Platty Joobs, we’ve explored the first half of 2022 in words. The second half of the year was marked by a series of disasters—natural and economic—and our experts have taken a look at the words that sum up this turbulent time.
The extreme weather of July 2022 led to a surge in use of the word heatwave. In Portugal, temperatures reached 47°C in mid-July, while usage of the word spiked in British English sources as the UK experienced record temperatures of up to 40°C.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) first quotation of heatwave is from 1842. When it was first used, it normally referred to a wave of hot weather passing from one place to another. Now, we use it to describe a period of abnormally hot weather.
In July 2022, the word was almost 4.5 times more frequent in UK sources than the previous month.
The rest of the world experienced extreme weather events too, with catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, and wildfires and droughts around the world. These events were seen as a stark reminder of the impact of climate change and the unpredictability it is causing in global weather systems.
Our term for August 2022 is cost of living.
The term is first recorded in the OED in 1796 and defined as “the general cost of goods and services viewed as necessary to maintain an average or minimal standard of living (such as food, housing, transport, etc.)” with a specific economics clause referring to “the average cost of such goods and services as measured by a representative price index.”
Frequency of the term gradually rose throughout 2022, with its usage increasing more than four-fold between December 2021 and August 2022, and levels staying high for the remainder of the year.
This increase was down to the economic situation that much of the world found itself in, with many people struggling with the cost of fuel and the price of basic necessities rising. Headlines included: “Fun is out as cost of living soars” (Courier Mail, 1 Aug 2022) and “Cost of living: How to cope with the rise in prices” (Independent, 31 Aug 2022).
That this situation was playing out around the world is reflected in the term’s usage too, which was geographically widespread and not restricted to any particular country or region.
A number of other terms related to the cost-of-living crisis saw increases in usage throughout the year, including energy crisis, fuel poverty, fuel crisis, permacrisis, and warm bank.
After the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, it was announced that Her Majesty’s coffin would lie in state for five days to allow mourners to pay respects to the late monarch.
This initiated the longest queue—our word for September—in British history, as more than 250,000 people waited patiently to make their way to Westminster Hall.
The queue caught the attention of the British and international media, with a live feed from the Palace of Westminster tracking its length and #TheQueue trending on Twitter. The word queue was used around 3.5 times more frequently than the previous month and year.
As a word, queue is borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman and Middle French, and derives from the Latin word cauda, meaning a tail (of an animal). It was first recorded in English in the fifteenth century with reference to ribbons or bands of parchment bearing seals and attached to a letter.
The earliest quotations for the queue that we all know today—“a line or sequence of people, vehicles, etc., waiting their turn to proceed, or to be attended to”—are found in a French context. Thomas Carlyle provided our first clearly English citation, writing in 1837 “That talent… of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes… the French People.” Since then, however, this has become a distinctively British word for what users of North American English would call a line.
Many of the words seeing a significant increase in usage in September 2022 were references to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Monarch and monarchy, coffin, mourning and mourner, coronation, respects, corgi, and queen, which was recently chosen as the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year 2022, were all in the top ten words in our corpus which were significantly more frequent in September than the months before. Lying-in-state and catafalque (a platform on which a coffin is placed) saw a significant increase in usage too.
The only item in the top ten words for September not to relate to the death of HM The Queen is mini-budget. More to come on this word shortly…
How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part two)
In the first blog post of our A Year in Words series, we looked at some of the words that dominated our conversations and rose in usage during the first quarter of 2022: from booster to Ukraine, via the less well-known monobob.
Now, our experts look at April to June and what the language we used can tell us about these eventful months.
A defining moment in Boris Johnson’s premiership came with a linguistic twist: partygate.
Referring to a series of social gatherings held in 10 Downing Street and other government buildings during the national COVID-19 lockdowns, this political scandal ran through much of 2022.
The word partygate began to crop up in December 2021, with its usage increasing dramatically in January and February and then peaking in April, as the nation waited for the publication of civil servant Sue Gray’s report into the parties.
Although a very British scandal, the word partygate reflects the influence of the United States in the language of politics around the world. Partygate is one of a large and varied group of words taking the suffix -gate, which denotes an actual or alleged scandal and often an attempted cover-up. These scandals take their name from the 1972 Watergate scandal where people connected with President Nixon’s Republican administration were caught breaking into, and attempting to bug, the national headquarters of the Democratic Party (in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C.) during a presidential election campaign.
And this isn’t the first time a scandal involving controversial celebrations has been dubbed partygate.
The word goes back to at least the late 1990s, with a 1997 article in the South China Morning Post suggesting a senior politician had used public money to fund a private party and calling the affair “Partygate.”
From then on, the word has been used intermittently to refer to a variety of unconnected scandals, all flaring up then disappearing. Time will tell if 2022’s partygate will become the word’s definitive moment.
While the partygate headlines rolled on into May, this month was also marked by an outbreak of monkeypox, leading to the word being used nearly 300 times more than in May 2021, and almost 600 times more than in April 2022.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) earliest evidence of the word monkeypox—“a disease resembling smallpox which affects various species of rodent, monkey, and ape, originally in western and central Africa, and which is transmissible to humans”—is from 1960, two years after it was first identified among laboratory monkeys in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In May 2022, words such as virus, symptoms, outbreak, infection, and spread were among those found near monkeypox, with others such as skin-to-skin, contact, and vaccine increasing in visibility as the outbreak progressed and focus shifted to public health attempts to limit its spread.
Its usage continued to grow before reaching a peak in August 2022, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) invited submissions for an alternative name for the disease. They were seeking to mitigate a rise in racist and stigmatising language associated with the disease, as part of an ongoing effort to ensure that the names of diseases do not create or reinforce negative associations or stereotypes. Our lexicographer Danica Salazar has written more on major health crises and language with Richard Karl Deang from the University of Virginia.
In November, it was announced that the WHO would phase out monkeypox in favour of mpox and urged other agencies to do the same.
One of the biggest events of the summer was Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee—the first and only time a British monarch has reached the milestone of 70 years on the throne.
The Jubilee, celebrated over the first weekend of June 2022, was marked in the UK by a two-day bank holiday enabling four days of street parties, parades, concerts, and services of thanksgiving.
This event prompted the creation of a new term—Platty Joobs.
This term burst onto the scene on 20 April 2022 when the actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe, one of the stars of the BBC sitcom Ghosts, tweeted:
“I dunno about you man gassed for Lizzies Platty Joobs. I don’t even know what it is but i’m READY. Might make some trainers on Nike ID 🎯💯 🤞🏾”
A month later, towards the end of May, it began to appear as a hashtag on Twitter.
While anticipation for this unprecedented celebration undoubtedly drove the use of Platty Joobs, discussion of the phrase itself also helped its spread.
Twitter users were divided on whether they loved or hated the playful abbreviation. Even those opposed found it hard not to succumb to what proved to be a lexical earworm. On 25 May, journalist and author Caitlin Moran tweeted:
“The Platinum Jubilee being called “The Platty Joobs” might be the worst thing to have ever happened in my lifetime. And yet … I’ve started whispering it to myself.”
We’re halfway through the year, and both politically and linguistically what a busy six months it was. Over our next two instalments we’ll cover the rest of 2022, with words relating to the extreme weather we experienced, the economic crises around the world and, of course, the passing of the UK’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.
How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part one)
Now the dust has settled on another eventful year, it’s time to look back on some of the words that characterised 2022.
In December, we announced goblin mode as our Word of the Year for 2022, decided by public vote for the first time ever. A type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations, goblin mode captured imaginations globally, with Stephen King joining in on Twitter, a discussion on the Late Late Show with James Corden, and online conversations spanning Europe, Asia, and America. While the lifting of pandemic restrictions was a relief for many, for some people, the social pressures like going out and returning to the office that came along with it were less welcome, and the idea of goblin mode captured a desire to escape those pressures as society returned to a new and different “normal.”
But when our experts analysed our corpus of 19 billion words, as well as finding candidates for the 2023 Word of the Year, they also looked at trends in how certain words were used at different points throughout the year.
Over this series of articles, we will take a month-by-month look at the words—excluding the three candidates for Word of the Year: goblin mode, metaverse, and #IStandWith—that captured a moment and saw peaks in usage in 2022.
From existing words that surged in popularity, like booster and queue, to brand-new words, such as Platty Joobs, and others making a comeback (did you know the word partygate was first used in the 1990s?), the language we use can tell us a lot about the last 12 months, the issues that have resonated, and the experiences we have shared.
Cast your mind back to this time last year and it was COVID-19 vaccinations that dominated the headlines. Our Word of the Year for 2021 was vax, and this conversation rumbled on into the New Year, with healthcare at the forefront of our minds in the wake of the pandemic and continuing to shape the language we use.
With that in mind, our experts have chosen booster as the word that best represents January 2022.
By no means a new word, booster was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 1890, with the sense “a dose or injection of a substance that increases or prolongs the effectiveness of an earlier dose or injection” first recorded in 1950.
It experienced a spike in frequency in December 2021 and January 2022 and was used more than 12 times more frequently in January 2022 than the same time the previous year.
Unsurprisingly, this increase in usage was caused by the push to ensure people across the world had received a booster jab of the COVID-19 vaccine. We can see this from looking at the other words used near booster. In January 2021, these showed the variety of its uses: morale booster and rocket booster for instance, alongside vaccine-related terms such as booster dose. In January 2022, however, while other uses were still prevalent, they were overwhelmed by vaccine-related terms, such as receive a booster, eligible for a booster, booster programme, and many others.
From a well-known word that exploded in use to a hardly-known word bursting back onto the scene, our word for February is monobob.
Monobob is the first-ever female-only Winter Olympic sport, introduced at the Winter Olympics last year in Beijing. It is a solo version of bobsleigh, and it has significantly increased women’s participation in the sport.
Usage of the term monobob can be dated back to at least the 1930s in reference to a one-person bobsleigh. A dramatic entry in The Daily Telegraph on 18th January 1935 commented:
“The mishap occurred at a turn. Mr. Dugdale was on a mono-bob and it was noticed that he took the turn wrongly. His bob swung rapidly from side to side and he was thrown off.”
But the inaugural Olympic monobob competition led to a spike in usage of the term, with monobob used almost 12 times as much in February 2022 than February 2021.
The term monobob was used all around the world, but we saw two nations adopt the term more than others: Canada and Jamaica. The spike in Jamaican usage reflects the popularity of bobsled sports on the island nation: the unexpected entry of a Jamaican team in the 1988 Winter Olympics inspired the 1993 film Cool Runnings. Over 30 years later, Jamaica remains one of only three Caribbean nations to send bobsled teams regularly to the Winter Olympics, qualifying for a record three competitions last year, and sending Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian to compete in the new monobob event. The increase in Canadian usage might reflect the fact that Canada’s Christine de Bruin took Bronze in Bejing, coming behind US gold and silver medallists in the new event.
Following the country’s invasion by Russian forces at the end of previous month, the word for March unsurprisingly was Ukraine.
The word Ukraine was used over 75 times more frequently in March 2022 than the previous year, and over 5.5 times more frequently in March 2022 than February 2022.
There is no denying that this spike in usage was due to the invasion, as shown by a number of other words experiencing an uplift in usage, relating both to the situation—invasion, invade, bombardment, besieged, unprovoked, and war-torn—and the international reaction—humanitarian, sanction, and oligarch.
In the past, the name Ukraine was frequently used in English with the definite article—the Ukraine—but this usage decreased after the country gained independence in 1991 after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. Usage of the Ukraine, in proportion to overall uses of Ukraine, dropped further from March last year as the media and the public took conscious action to avoid using Russo-centric language to describe the region—a trend also seen with the media (for the most part) referring to the capital using the Ukrainian Kyiv rather than the Russian Kiev.
That’s all for this first instalment of the year in words. Keep an eye on the blog as we explore the rest of 2022 in words, including partygate, monkeypox, and more…
A Q&A with Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around”
The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner—who has been called “the least stuffy grammarian around” and was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace—about what it means to write a usage dictionary.
“Possesses” is a good word for it. In my case, it was matter of falling in love with the genre as a teenager. I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1942) and immediately felt that it was the most fascinating book I’d ever held. Partridge discussed every “problem point” in the language—words that people use imprecisely, phrases that professional editors habitually eliminate, words that get misspelled because people falsely associate them with similar-looking words, the common grammatical blunders, and so on. And then Partridge had essays on such linguistic topics as concessive clauses, conditional clauses, elegancies, hyphenation, negation, nicknames, and obscurity (“It may be better to be clear than clever; it is still better to be clear and correct.”).
At the age of 16, I was going on a ski trip with friends, and the book had just arrived in the mail as I was leaving for New Mexico. I stuck it in my bag and didn’t open it until we arrived at the ski lodge. Upon starting to read it, I was hooked. In fact, I didn’t even ski the first day: I was soaking up all that I could from Usage and Abusage, which kept mentioning some mysterious man named Fowler.
So when I got home, I ordered Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2d ed. 1965), and when it arrived I decided it was even better. By the time I was 17, I’d memorized virtually every linguistic stance taken by Partridge and Fowler, and I was thoroughly imbued with their approach to language. By the time I’d graduated from high school, I added Wilson Follett, Bergen Evans, and Theodore Bernstein to the mix. I was steeped in English usage—as a kind of closet study. I spent far more time on these books than I did on my schoolwork.
I suppose in retrospect it looks predictable that I’d end up writing a usage dictionary. I started my first one (A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage) when I was 23, and I’ve been at it ever since. That was 41 years ago, and it ended up being my first book with Oxford University Press.
You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.
Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.
It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.
I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had. By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.
“I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had.”
I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. I liked combustible, raucous words, such as blast, bray, fulminate, and thunder. I liked arch, high-toned words, such as athwart, calumny, cynosure, and decrepitude. I liked toga-wearing, Socratic-sounding words, such as eristic, homunculus, palimpsest, and theologaster. I liked mellifluous, polysyllabic words, such as antediluvian, postprandial, protuberance, and undulation. I liked the technical and quasi-technical terms of rhetoric, such as asyndeton, periphrasis, quodlibet, and synecdoche. I liked frequentative verbs with an onomatopoetic feel, such as gurgle, jostle, piffle, and topple. I liked evocative words about language, such as billingsgate, logolatry, wordmonger, and zinger. I liked scatological, I-can’t-believe-this-term-exists words, such as coprolalia, fimicolous, scatomancy, and stercoraceous. I liked astonishing, denotatively necessary words that more people ought to know, such as mumpsimus and ultracrepidarian. I liked censoriously yelping words, such as balderdash, hooey, pishposh, and poppycock. I liked mirthful, tittering words, such as cowlick, flapdoodle, horsefeathers, and icky.
In short, I fell in love with language. I filled hundreds of pages in my vocabulary notebooks.
In the end, I decided that I liked the word lexicographer better than copyist, so I tried my hand at it.
I was trying to impress her, it’s true. I never called her. I just started using lots of big words. It took me about two years to realize that big words, in themselves, have no intrinsic value in attracting females. Perhaps the opposite.
But that’s okay. By the time I was 17, I had this prodigious vocabulary. I thought of SAT words as being quite elementary. I had a larger vocabulary then than I do today. You can see why, at the ski lodge in early 1975, this particular teenager was absolutely primed to relish the work of Eric Partridge and H.W. Fowler.
That’s true. But it all began with words and English usage. Then I moved to legal lexicography and other language-related topics.
Many if not most lexicographers today are interested in slang, in current catchphrases, and in jargon—the more shifting and volatile parts of language. (Always something new!) I’m different. I’ve always been interested in the durable parts. In my usage book, I tackle the difficult question of what, precisely, constitutes Standard Written English. In any era, that’s a complicated question or series of questions. And so I’ve answered it in a 1,200-page book, word by word and phrase by phrase. It’s intended for writers, editors, and serious word lovers.
Of course. I’m very Fowlerian and Partridgean in my mindset. Though all my essays are original, some bear the same category-titles as Fowler’s (for example, “Archaisms,” “Needless Variants,” and “Split Infinitives” ) or Partridge’s (“Clichés,” “Johnsonese,” and “Slang” [yes, that]). Meanwhile, I’ve created new essay-categories of my own, much in the mold of my admired predecessors: “Airlinese,” “Estranged Siblings,” “Hypercorrection,” “Irregular Verbs,” “Skunked Terms,” “Word-Swapping,” and the like). I have a dozen new essays in the fifth edition, including “Irreversible Binomials,” “Loanwords,” “Prejudiced and Prejudicial Terms,” “Race-Related Terms,” and “Serial Comma” (a big one). These essays are some fun.
Yes, something like that. Consider an example. Note that an asterisk before a term denotes that it’s nonstandard:
tic-tac-toe (the elementary game in which two players draw X’s or O’s within a pattern of nine squares, the object being to get three in a row), a phrase dating from the mid-1800s in AmE, has been predominantly so spelled since about 1965. Before that, the variants *tick-tack-toe, *ticktacktoe, and even *tit-tat-toe were about equally common. The British usually call the game noughts and crosses.
Current ratio (tic-tac-toe vs. *tit-tat-toe vs. *tick-tack-toe vs. *ticktacktoe): 96:4:3:1
There are thousands of such entries. As you can see, a usage-book entry is entirely different from a normal dictionary entry.
Yes. Those are key. I’m capitalizing on big data, which makes GMEU entries empirically grounded in a way that earlier usage books couldn’t be. This is a great era for lexicographers and grammarians: we can assess word frequencies in various databases that include millions of published and spoken instances of a word or phrase. By comparison, the evidence on which Fowler and Partridge based their opinions was sparse. In my case, opinion is kept to a minimum, and facts come to the fore. Sometimes that entails inconveniently discovering that the received wisdom has been way off base.
“People who say they’re sticking to the original Fowler might as well be driving an original Model-T.”
I’ve heard that. It’s a naive view. For one thing, the empirical statistics on relative word frequencies have been updated from 2008 to 2019. The language has evolved: email is now predominantly solid. There are thousands of updated ratios, and some of the judgments differ from those in past editions. For example, overly and snuck are now declared to be unobjectionable.
Every single page of the book has new material. It’s a big improvement. The six years have allowed for much more research.
People who say they’re sticking to the original Fowler might as well be driving an original Model-T.
Here’s something reference books have in common with medical devices. There’s no reason for a new one unless it’s a significant improvement over its precursors. That’s how the field gets better and better.
I’m just a dogged researcher. That’s all. Research is simply formalized curiosity, and I seem to have an inexhaustible curiosity about practical problems that arise for writers and editors. I certainly wouldn’t call myself “the world’s leading authority on the English language.”
I’ve also been helped by generous scholars, especially by John Simpson, the Oxford lexicographer, and Geoffrey K. Pullum, the Edinburgh grammarian. And then I had a panel of 34 critical readers who minutely reviewed 55-page segments for suggested improvements. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the contributions of all these erudite friends.
In any event, a lexicographer must be especially adept at delayed gratification. You labor for years and then wait. You’re lucky, as Samuel Johnson once said, if you can just “escape censure.” That some people have praised my work, after all these years of toil, is certainly pleasing. But for me, the real pleasure is in the toil itself: asking pertinent questions and finding useful, fact-based answers to all the nettlesome problems that arise in our wildly variegated English language.
Find out more and buy Garner’s Modern English Usage, Fifth Edition →
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