merriam-webster

If you were to choose a word that rose above most in 2020, which word would it be?

Merriam-Webster has updated its dictionary entry on “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” a term many Asian Americans saw as antiquated and even racist

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is adding a new entry to the definition of the pronoun “they”: a way to refer to a nonbinary individual, one who identifies as neither exclusively male nor female, NBC News reported. It’s been a year of heightened visibility for nonbinary people, from the popularity of MTV’s “sexually fluid” season of the dating show “Are You the One?”...

This week, Americans across the country have united to cheer on local contestants participating in the orthographic sport known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A field of roughly 11 million students nationwide pared down to 562 spellers at the start of the national competition Tuesday. Roughly a dozen spellers will advance to the prime-time finals Thursday night. The winner...

The word that knocked runner-up Naysa Modi out of last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was “Bewusstseinslage” — one of those flashy, impossible-sounding German-derived words that make the audience gasp when they are announced. Naysa believes the seemingly mundane word that knocked her out the year before was just as intimidating, if not more. For the spellers who will gather...

Get swole, prepare a bug-out bag, grab a go-cup and maybe you’ll have a better chance of surviving the omnicide. Translation: Hit the gym and bulk up, put a bunch of stuff essential for survival in an easy-to-carry bag, grab a drink for the road, and perhaps you’ll live through a man-made disaster that could wipe out the human race....

Racial justice. Obstruction of justice. Social justice. The Justice Department. Merriam-Webster has chosen “justice” as its 2018 word of the year, driven by the churning news cycle over months and months. The word follows “toxic,” picked by Oxford Dictionaries, and “misinformation,” plucked by Dictonary.com. Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, told The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s announcement that “justice”...

Scrabble players, time to rethink your game because 300 new words are coming your way, including some long-awaited gems: OK and ew, to name a few. Merriam-Webster released the sixth edition of “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” on Monday, four years after the last freshening up. The company, at the behest of Scrabble owner Hasbro Inc., left out one possibility...

Let me ask you this: Would a story that unpacks a list of tiresome words and phrases be impactful or a nothingburger? Worse, could it just be fake news? Northern Michigan’s Lake Superior State University on Sunday released its 43rd annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness . The tongue-in-cheek, non-binding list...

This may or may not come as a surprise: Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2017 is “feminism.” Yes, it’s been a big year or two or 100 for the word. In 2017, lookups for feminism increased 70 percent over 2016 on Merriam-Webster.com and spiked several times after key events, lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, the company’s editor at large, told The...

Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and...

The popular mobile word game Words With Friends has added one of the internet’s most popular typos in recent days — “covfefe.” The mysterious term that President Donald Trump tweeted has spread like wildfire on social media and the Scrabble-like multiplayer game has jumped aboard, defining the word as “the amount and quality of reporting when autocorrect fails you at...

Noah Webster eliminated many inconsistencies in English spellings in his first dictionary and in the blue-backed spelling books published for American classrooms, but fortunately for the survival of spelling bees his reforms went only so far. Otherwise English might have been scrubbed of the quirky letter combinations that have bedeviled generations of school children but that also gave rise to...

A day after viral videos of a bloodied man being dragged off a United Express flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport by aviation security fueled criticism of the airline, Twitter users poked fun at the airline’s tactics.