Online dictionary Merriam-Webster.com has announced its word of the year for 2019 – ‘they’.<\/p>\n
The selection is determined by data and must have been a top lookup at Merriam-Webster.com in the past twelve months. It must also have seen a significant increase in lookups over the previous year.<\/p>\n
“Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they<\/em>. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term, among the most common in the language\u2014a personal pronoun\u2014can rise to the top of our data,” the group said.<\/p>\n “Although our lookups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of they<\/em> has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years, and especially in the past year.”<\/p>\n Merriam-Webster said that lookups for they<\/em>\u00a0increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year.<\/p>\n This curiosity is remarkable for a venerable old pronoun, but this is a special case, and a consequence of shifts in the way\u00a0they<\/em> is used, it said.<\/p>\n English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like\u00a0everyone<\/em>,\u00a0someone<\/em>, and\u00a0anyone<\/em>, and as a consequence\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.<\/p>\n More recently, though,\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is\u00a0nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as all over social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers.<\/p>\n There’s no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September.<\/p>\n
\n