A few weeks after Oxford Dictionaries couldn’t even find a word to call Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster announced this week that its Word of the Year is a suffix.
Merriam-Webster’s 2015 Word of the Year is -ism. They picked the word because their site saw an increase of people looking up “ism”s on their site. It’s a suffix that originally turned verbs into nouns, but is now often used for identifying religion or practices, adherence to a system or a trait. It is also used to point out specific prejudices based on a quality (like sexism or ageism).
“Ism” has also become a word itself over time as a noun meaning “a distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory” or “an oppressive and especially discriminatory attitude or belief,” Merriam-Webster notes.
Almost all of the top words searched for on Merriam-Webster are isms. They are:
- socialism
- fascism
- racism
- feminism
- communism
- capitalism
- terrorism
- marriage
- hypocrite
- respect
- inspiration
- minion
In November, Oxford Dictionaries named the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji as its word of the year. Last week, Dictionairy.com actually did pick a full word for its word of the year - “identity.”