For the first time in the 12 years of "Word of the Year", the editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries have chosen a suffix to be the word of the year - "ism." For only a three letter word, ism has made a significant impact on people's searching habits this year, with the dictionary company's website reporting a large spike in this year's traffic coming from people looking up words such as socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism, according to the Associated Press.
The patterns in searching trends are thought to reflect the interests of everyday life, with the rise in popularity of terms such as socialism being attributed to presidential candidate Bernie Sander's definition of himself as a democratic socialist, according to Time.
The word terrorism was searched more frequently in the same time frame as the police shooting of a black teenager in Chicago, while searches for fascism corresponded with notable instances of Donald Trump's anti-Islam rhetoric, according the AP.
"We had a lot on our minds this year", company editor Peter Sokolowski said recently, according to CBS News, "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices. We're educating ourselves."
Feminism topped the search engines in April after reports came out that a middle-school student wearing a T-shirt with the word on had it digitally censored in a school photo by administrators, according to ABC News. Caitlyn Jenner, the film "Mad Max," Emma Watson and Hillary Clinton are also factors that are believed to contribute to the popularity of searching feminism.
Merriam-Webster has been choosing a word of the year since 2003 and went with culture for last year's choice. Other dictionary companies have taken similarly current inspirations for their notable words, with Oxford Dictionaries deciding on an emoji called "Face with Tears of Joy" for their pick, according to ABC News.
