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The Oxford Word of the Year 2018 is… toxic.
Oxford
Dictionaries: 11.15.2018
The
adjective toxic is defined as ‘poisonous’ and first appeared in
English in the mid-seventeenth century from the medieval Latin toxicus,
meaning ‘poisoned’ or ‘imbued with poison’.
But
the word’s deadly history doesn’t start there. The medieval Latin term was in
turn borrowed from the Latin toxicum, meaning ‘poison’, which has its
origins in the Greek toxikon pharmakon – lethal poison used by the
ancient Greeks for smearing on the points of their arrows. Interestingly, it is
not pharmakon, the word for poison, that made the leap into Latin here,
but toxikon, which comes from the Greek word for ‘bow’, toxon.
The
Oxford Word of the Year is a word or expression that is judged to reflect the
ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential
as a term of cultural significance.
In
2018, toxic added many strings to its poisoned bow becoming an
intoxicating descriptor for the year’s most talked about topics. It is the sheer
scope of its application, as found by our research, that made toxic the
stand-out choice for the Word of the Year title.
Our
data shows that, along with a 45% rise in the number of times it has been
looked up on oxforddictionaries.com,
over the last year the word toxic has been used in an array of
contexts, both in its literal and more metaphorical senses.
Drawn
from our corpus, the top 10 toxic collocates for the year – that is,
words habitually used alongside toxic – are indicative of this.
Big
Dick Energy (BDE)
Cakeism
Gammon
Gaslighting
verb
Incel
noun
Orbiting
Overtourism
Techlash
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