What will be the word of decade?

Fake news. App. Hashtag — group will have last say

One word was used to epitomize the entire 20th century.

Was it “progress,” to mark the march of civilization from buggies to astronauts and the iPhone?

Maybe “upheaval,” to delineate genocides and civic unrest? No.

Try “jazz,” to describe not only music, but the sweep and swing of the quintessential American century, and the cultural flows that invigorated it.

Who gets to decide such weighty, wordy things? The little-known American Dialect Society, or ADS, founded in 1889 and dedicated to the study of the English language in North America.

ADS has been picking a word of the year since 1990, longer than any other entity. Its members selected “jazz” from dozens of possible words in January

2000.

Now fast forward to the first week of 2020, when

300 to 400 of the society’s language scholars are expected to meet in New Orleans to determine the word of 2019, as well as the even more consequential word of the decade that ends on New Year’s Eve. The word of the previous decade, by the way, was “google,” meaning “to search the internet.”

Words of the year chosen by the ADS are not necessarily new words; they could be old ones used in new ways, said Marianna Di Paolo, emeritus linguistics professor and ADS member from the University of Utah. One example is “occupy,” connected to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest against inequality.

During the last decade, the words of each year have bubbled out of the highboiling soup of turbulent and tech-conscious times:

“App” in 2010. “Occupy” in 2011. “Hashtag” in 2012. “Because X” (a modern construction illustrated by the example, “Why would men wear capes? Because fashion”) in 2013.

“#BlackLivesMatter” in 2014. “They” as a singular pronoun in 2015. “Dumpster fire” (describing election-related “public discourse and preoccupations”) in 2016. “Fake news” in 2017. Last year, “tenderage shelter” (a euphemism referencing the facilities in which some immigrant children were separated from their parents). It beat out “the wall” (at the southern border).

The word of the decade won’t necessarily be one of the yearly winners, said Ben Zimmer, the internationally known linguist and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who once penned the “On Language” column for The New York Times Magazine. The ADS draws up lists of candidates that may not become words of the year, but might still have a shot at being the 2010-19 representative.