‘Feminism’ is word of the year

This is the year when a sea of pink dominated the streets of several American cities, the year when #MeToo became a symbolic driving force against sexual misconduct by men, and when a group of women — “The Silence Breakers” — graced the cover of Time as the voices that launched that movement.

These events, says Merriam-Webster, are the reasons 2017 was a big year for feminism — at least literally.

The online dictionary has dubbed “feminism” its word of the year, meaning it is the most-searched word on Merriam-Webster’s website. Lookups for the definition of feminism increased by 70 percent over last year. There were also several major spikes that coincide with major news events, said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large.

“No one word can ever encapsulate all the news, events, or stories of a given year, particularly a year with so much news and so many stories,” Sokolowski said. “But when a single word is looked up with great volume, it also stands out as one associated with several different important stories. We can learn something about ourselves through the prism of vocabulary.”

Sokolowski said the first such spike happened in January, when thousands of women packed the streets of several cities in the United States and beyond in a massive act of defiance against a newly inaugurated president. Discussions on what the word meant to attendees and organizers of the Women’s March, and whether the protest was a show of feminism, fueled the spike, he said.

Searches for the word spiked again the following month, when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, distanced herself from the term.

“It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly is very pro-abortion, and I’m neither anti-male or pro-abortion. So, there’s an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choices. ... I look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances,” Conway said during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Maryland last February.

Merriam-Webster said the storm of revelations in the latter half of 2017 and the emergence of #MeToo, a hashtag that countless of women used on social media to say that they have been victims of some form of sexual misconduct or harassment, resulted in a steady increase in searches for what feminism is.