Woman is the Dictionary.com’s ‘Word of Year’. Pexels.com.
New Delhi: Woman is the Dictionary.com’s ‘Word of the Year’. “It’s a word that’s inseparable from the story of 2022,” Dictionary.com said, adding that searches for the word spiked “significantly multiple times” in relation to separate high-profile events.
The Dictionary.com said the word woman is one of the oldest words in the English language and “one that’s fundamental not just to our vocabulary but to who we are as humans.”
The word woman is a noun and it means “an adult female person”.
Why woman chosen as 2022 word of the year?
Dictionary.com said that searches for the word woman rose sharply in several high-profile events, including the moment when a question about the very definition of the word was posed on the national stage.
“Our selection of woman as our 2022 Word of the Year reflects how the intersection of gender, identity, and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary,” Dictionary.com said.
‘Woman’ searched 1,400 per cent more
The lookups for the word woman rose 1,400 per cent, which is a huge leap for such a common word. The search spike started at the end of the month of March during a confirmation heard for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in April became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice.
The surge in search rose after Jackson was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn to provide a definition for the word woman.
In May, lookups for the word rose following a leak revealing that US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Searches further spiked again in June and July.
In June, the court formally issued its ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, officially overturning Roe.
For the unversed, the Cambridge Dictionary recently updated its entries for “man” and “woman” to include transgender people.
The primary definition for “woman” remains “an adult female human being,” a second definition refers to “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth” in the Cambridge Dictionary.
Similarly, “man” has been defined as “an adult male human being” and also “an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”
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