What’s the word of the year for 2024? Well, it depends on who you’re asking.
The Collins Word of the Year is “brat,” meaning “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.” Pop singer Charli XCX inspired this meaning with her album titled “Brat.”
“Brat” can still mean a misbehaved child. However, this year, the new adjective version of the word from Charli XCX turned it into Collins’ No. 1 choice. The recently-coined definition took off after Charli XCX tweeted about Vice President Kamala Harris. Many of her fans also started embracing a “brat summer.”
Collins said, “brat” is certainly not a new word; it’s been in conversation since around the 1500s. But like many of 2024’s most popular words, it has a new life with a modern meaning.
The same goes for Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year, “demure.” The word came to mean “refined and sophisticated appearance or behavior in various contexts, such as work.”
Its popularity is largely attributed to TikToker Jools Lebron. Dictionary.com said usage of the term increased by nearly 1,200% from January through August.
And how about a word used by Chaucer in 1380? “Manifest” is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. It’s defined these days as “to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”
Cambridge points to influential figures such as Olympian Simone Biles and musicians Dua Lipa and Sabrina Carpenter using the term. That led to people searching the term nearly 130,000 times this year.
However, while the word is popular, there’s more to achieving a dream than just thinking about it.
“Manifesting is what we would call a form of pseudo-scientific thinking,” University of Cambridge professor Sander van der Linden said. “Having realistic goals, being positive about those goals, affirming the things that work in life and rewarding yourself and other people for achieving those goals, those are all evidence-based steps towards achieving meaningful outcomes but simply wishing that they happen without doing anything is not.”
Given how contentious the Word of the Year debate has been, Merriam-Webster’s entry fits right in. The word is “polarization,” meaning “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”
Merriam-Webster said this word dates back to the 1800s. However, this year, Americans looked it up to better “understand the complex state of affairs in our country and around the world.”
Now, if all these words and definitions are making your head spin, you will hopefully not feel the Oxford University Press’ Word of the Year: “brain rot.”
This term means “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
The publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary said “brain rot” increased in usage frequency by 230% from 2023 to 2024. The first recorded use was by Henry David Thoreau in 1854.
Today, it’s meant to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.
So while the Word of the Year may still be in question, there is no doubt with a new year ahead, new words are about to pop up in our vocabulary — or at least new meanings.
You can take our word for it.
