Word of the year: Merriam-Webster shows it’s the authentic authority of language

Merriam-Webster has decided what the word that truly signifies what 2023 was and that word is authentic.

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The dictionary company announced that lookups for the word authentic were heavy and steadily increased through the past 11 months, The Associated Press reported.

The runner-ups included: deepfake, coronation, dystopian, implode, doppelgänger, kibbutz and deadname, among others.

The word authentic has several meanings. It can be “not false or imitation” or “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” It is also a synonym of real or actual.

The searches came during a time of deepfakes and artificial intelligence, when it felt like everyone was trying to separate truth from simulations.

The AP reported that people were also looking for authentic cuisine, authentic voice, authentic self and authenticity as artifice — anything to make life feel real.

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” Merriam-Webster’s editor at large Peter Sokolowski told the AP. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

To authenticate the word’s selection the team that picks the word of the year used hard data — the spikes of lookups of words — to make the determination. They use that information to then compare to what was happening at the time of the spikes.

But authentic didn’t have spikes. It was a constant increase in traffic that helped the team decide on making it the word of the year.

Searches for artificial intelligence, Taylor Swift, Prince Harry and even Elon Musk all helped contribute to the popularity of authentic.

It now joins such words as gaslighting (2022), vaccine (2021) and pandemic (2020) for the most recent words of the year, according to Merriam-Webster.