Forget 'selfie.' The Merriam-Webster word of 2013: 'Science'
Merriam-Webster reported a 176 percent increase in look-ups of the word 'science' on its website this year. A Merriam-Webster editor says that the most looked-up words in the dictionary reflect the big ideas that are lurking behind the headlines.
Look alive, selfie. There's another word of the year that's not all about you.
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While Oxford University Press, the British publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, declared those little smartphone self-portraits its winner last month, the folks at Merriam-Webster announced "science" on Tuesday.
Oxford tracked a huge jump in overall usage of selfie, but Merriam-Webster stuck primarily to look-ups on its website, recording a 176 percent increase for science when compared with last year.
"The more we thought about it, the righter it seemed in that it does lurk behind a lot of big stories that we as a society are grappling with, whether it's climate change or environmental regulation or what's in our textbooks," said John Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., based in Springfield, Mass.
Our data shows that many of the most looked-up words in the dictionary are words that reflect the big ideas that are lurking behind the headlines, writes Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski in a statement.
Science, Mr. Morse said, is connected to broad cultural oppositions science versus faith, for instance along with the power of observation and intuition, reason and ideology, evidence and tradition. Of particular note, to Merriam-Webster, anyway, is fallout from the October release of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants."
Gladwell, a popularizer of scientific thought and research in best-sellers and The New Yorker magazine, takes on the challenges of obstacles and the nature of disabilities and setbacks in the book. But he leaves science itself according to some critics as a rhetorical device for his main mission of storytelling.
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Forget 'selfie.' The Merriam-Webster word of 2013: 'Science'