Fake news named ‘word’ of the year

Et le mot de l’année est attribué à…

C’est l’expression fétiche de Donald Trump. Un an après l’élection du président américain, « fake news » est désigné « mot de l’année » par le dictionnaire britannique de référence, le Collins. Comme vous le verrez, la paternité du terme est quelque peu discutée…

Fake news has acquired a certain legitimacy after being named word of the year by Collins, following what the dictionary called its “ubiquitous presence” over the last 12 months.

2. Collins Dictionary’s lexicographers, who monitor the 4.5bn-word Collins corpus, said that usage of the term had increased by 365% since 2016. The phrase, often capitalised, is frequently a feature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric.

3. Trump has used the term frequently, and claimed last month to have invented it – “the media is really, the word, one of the greatest of all [the] terms I’ve come up with, is ‘fake’. I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it,” he told an interviewer. This etymology was disputed by the dictionary.

4. Collins said that “fake news” started being used in the noughties on US television to describe “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting”. Its usage has climbed since 2015, according to the dictionary, and really took off this year, with its

ubiquity to be acknowledged with a place in the next print edition of the Collins Dictionary.

5. A number of other words related to politics and current affairs were also in its list of the words of the year. “Echo chamber”, defined as “an environment, especially on a social media site, in which any statement of opinion is likely to be greeted with approval because it will only be read or heard by people who hold similar views”, has seen a “steady increase” in usage over the last five years, while “antifa” saw its usage rise by almost 7,000% following violent clashes between anti-fascist protesters and the far right, particularly in the US.

6. Corbynmania, up by 310%, was also on the list: Collins said the term for “fervent enthusiasm” for Jeremy Corbyn “first emerged in 2015 and after a dip last year made a striking comeback in 2017 as the Labour leader impressed on the campaign trail”.

7. “Much of this year’s list is definitely politically charged, but with a new president in the US and a snap election in the UK, it is perhaps no surprise that politics continues to electrify the language,” said Collins’s head of language content, Helen Newstead.