2024 Wordorigins Words of the Year (WOTY)

As in past years, I’ve come up with a list of Words of The Year (WOTY). I do things a bit differently from other sites in that I don’t try to select one term to represent the entire year. Instead, I select twelve terms, one for each month.

During the year as each month passed, I selected one word or phrase that was linguistically interesting, prominent in public discourse, or representative of major events of that month. Other such lists that are compiled at year’s end often exhibit a bias toward terms that are in vogue in November or December, and my hope is that a monthly list will highlight words that were significant earlier in the year and give a more comprehensive retrospective of the planet’s entire circuit around the sun. I also don’t publish the list until late in December; selections of words of the year that are made in November (or even earlier!), as some of them are, make no sense to me. You cannot legitimately select a word to represent a year when you’ve still got over a month or more left to go.

January: to swat, swatting

SWAT is an acronym standing for Special Weapons and Tactics, referring to paramilitary police units trained and equipped to respond to incidents where violence is expected. The acronym dates to 1967, but more recently the word has been used as a verb meaning to falsely report an incident requiring a SWAT team in order to terrorize and harm an innocent victim. This slang usage dates to at least 2006, but it rose to prominence in January 2024 when special prosecutor Jack Smith and US district court judge Tanya Chutkan were swatted. Both Smith and Chutkan were involved in cases where Donald Trump was the defendant.

 February: TikTalk

In February, a spate of news articles from outlets as diverse as the New York Post and the BBC published articles on TikTok voice or TikTalk, referring to a mode of speaking by social media influencers, especially female ones, on the TikTok platform which was heralded as “the future of the English language." But exactly what constituted TikTalk, other than the already well-established vocal features of uptalk and vocal fry, was not made clear. The fact that discussion of TikTalk quickly faded was proof that it wasn’t the “future” but rather a real but not particularly new or newsworthy feature of the language.

 March: memestock

A memestock is a publicly traded stock that experiences a sudden rise in value due to a concerted effort by a number of retail investors who organize over social media. The term dates to at least 2017. It came back into prominence in March due to initial public offering (IPO) of Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group, whose flagship product is the social media site Truth Social. Buoyed by thousands of rabid Trump fanatics, the IPO was extremely successful, making lots of money for Trump and other founding investors, but the market value of the company declined significantly throughout the year as it became clear that it had no path to profitability.

 April: totality

On 8 April a total eclipse of the sun was visible along a swath of North America running from Mexico and Texas to Maine and southeastern Canada. The general use of totality, meaning the entirety of something, dates to the late sixteenth century, but the astronomical sense meaning the period in which the sun or moon is entirely eclipsed is more recent, dating only the mid nineteenth century.

 May: encampment

Beginning in April and escalating in May, students at universities across the globe established encampments on university campuses to protest the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In many cases university administrations called upon police to disband the encampments, resulting in thousands of students being arrested. In others the encampments ended with the universities’ summer breaks. For the most part, the protests did not result in any significant changes to university or national policies—and they certainly did not affect Israeli policy or tactics—but they did demonstrate that support for the Palestinian cause was greater than many in governments or the legacy media had acknowledged.

June: brat summer

The summer of 2024 was declared brat summer due to three events: the release of musician CharlieXCX’s album brat on 7 June; the publication of Gabriel Smith’s novel Brat on 4 June; and the streaming-television debut of Andrew McCarthy’s documentary Brats, about the Brat Pack, on 13 June. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was subsequently declared to be “brat.” But, as expected, the brat phenomenon turned out to be ephemeral.

 July: broligarchy

Coined in 2009 but seeing its first appearance in published media in July 2024, a broligarchy (bro + oligarchy) is a political power structure controlled by a handful of men who are infused with toxic masculinity. The term’s coming to prominence in July is a result of the influence that a few Silicon Valley billionaires, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, exerted over Donald Trump and his campaign for the presidency.

 August: weird

At the end of July, Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz labeled the Republican VP candidate, Senator J.D. Vance weird. The mild insult was in sync with the zeitgeist and went viral in August. It encapsulated what a lot of people were feeling about the Republican ticket. Of course, in the end it didn’t keep half the country from voting for them, but for a brief moment weird was the word.

 September: sanewashing

Sanewashing is the portrayal of a radical or beyond-the-pale political idea as being within the mainstream of political discourse, making the insane idea appear sane. It is formed on the model of greenwashing (making an ecologically untenable idea or practice seem environmentally friendly) and whitewashing. Like broligarchy, it’s a good example of a word being older than most people think. The word dates to at least 2007, but it burst into public prominence in September when Parker Molloy, writing in the New Republic, used it in reference to legacy media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, framing Donald Trump’s fascist and racist agenda as being within the mainstream of American political discourse.

October: anticipatory obedience

Coinage of anticipatory obedience is often ascribed to Timothy Snyder and his 2017 book On Tyranny, but he did not originate the term The phrase appears in 1898 in Christian theological texts, using a metaphor of a servant foreseeing their master’s wishes or a disobedient child trying to get back into the graces of their parent to describe obedience to God. But it was applied to obedience to a totalitarian regime in 1980, when it referred to the people of the Soviet Union becoming informers during Stalin’s purges. The term was applied to the politics of the 2024 election in late October in regard to the actions of legacy media outlets in kowtowing to Donald Trump, specifically to the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, preventing his editorial staff from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, to NBC for not airing an unfavorable documentary of Trump, and to Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, preventing that paper from making an endorsement of a candidate. Both Soon-Shiong and Bezos have significant business interests that could be targeted by a vengeful Trump.

November: Xodus

Following the election of Donald Trump, users of Twitter/X, disgusted at owner Elon Musk’s support for Trump, left that social media site in droves, mostly converting over to Bluesky. The hashtag #xodus took off on Twitter/X on 11 November 2024, and by Thanksgiving Bluesky had grown to 23 million users, up from 9 million in September. There had been earlier waves of exits from Twitter/X since Musk acquired the company in October 2022, but this Xodus has been the largest and may very well be the death knell for the site.

December: retribution

The US news in early December was dominated by stories of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, many of whom vowed vengeance upon his political enemies, and the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by Luigi Mangione. Mangione’s apparent motive was that under Thompson’s leadership, the company had a policy of routinely denying valid claims. The combination of uproar over Trump’s cabinet picks and public lauding of Mangione hinted that the general public was catching on the fact that the Republicans and their corporate supporters were engaged in class warfare against ordinary Americans.

Image credits: 2024: David Revoy, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license; SWAT: Jamelle Bouie, 13 August 2014. Wikipedia, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; TikTalk: Wikipedia, public domain image, but carries trademark restrictions; memestock: Wikipedia, public domain image, but carries trademark restrictions; totality: David Wilton, 2024, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license; encampment: Maksim Sokolov, 2024, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; brat: Warner Media Group, 2024, Wikimedia Commons, fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted work to illustrate the topic under discussion; broligarchy: Elon Musk: Steve Jurvetson, 2015; Wikimedia Commons, Flickr.com, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Peter Thiel: Gage Skidmore, 2022; Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; weird: Samuel John Egbert Jones, c.1825, Royal Shakespeare Company Collection, public domain image; sanewashing: Ajay Suresh, 2019, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; anticipatory compliance: US government photo, 1943, Wikimedia Commons, public domain photo; Xodus: Wikimedia Commons, public domain image, but carries trademark restrictions; retribution: “Impending Retribution,” The Wasp, 7 October 1882, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image.