Listen to the author, Jessica Rundell, reading this blog post.
Towards the end of each year, the Cambridge Dictionary team gets together to pore over search data and decide which word deserves the title of Word of the Year, and 2024 is no different. This year, that word is manifest!
How do we choose our Word of the Year?
When we choose the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year, we have three considerations: user data, zeitgeist, and language. Which word was looked up most, or spiked? Which one really captures what was happening in that year? And what is interesting about this word from a language point of view?
Manifest met all three requirements:
User data
Manifest was one of the words on our top searches list, with 130,000 page views this year. We believe the searches were mainly driven by people looking up the sense that we added to the Cambridge Dictionary in May 2023:
to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen
Zeitgeist
The practice of manifesting became popular during the pandemic, when a host of manifesting influencers popped up on social media, giving tips on how to manifest money, career success, or more generally, abundance.
But it really entered the mainstream this year, with Olympians, Paralympians, singers, and other influential people all attributing their success to manifestation.
Language
We noticed a change in the words used with manifest and how they shifted from negative to positive. Previously, we mainly noticed collocations like symptom, disease, andstress:
The illness first manifested itself in severe stomach pains.
In teenagers, depression often manifests itself as anger.
More recently though, it began to be used with words like goal, success, anddream. In addition, we found that it was no longer just things manifesting themselves. People began to manifest the things they wanted:
Use these simple steps to manifest your dream job.
The swimmer says she manifested her first gold medal at the Paralympics.
Click here to find out more about the 600-year history of the word manifest and how it’s being used now!
Ten years of Word of the Year
Manifest is our 10th Word of the Year. This decade has been quite a rollercoaster, and the words we’ve chosen have captured that. There has been concern about politics and technological advances, and, of course, a global pandemic. On the upside, we’ve seen determination and positive spirit, an increased awareness of environmental issues, and an addictive word game that got everyone talking!
Here’s a look back at our previous winners:
2023: hallucinate
2022: homer
2021: perseverance
2020: quarantine
2019: upcycling
2018: nomophobia
2017: populism
2016: paranoid
2015: austerity
It’s always fascinating to see what people are looking up, and to speculate on why these spikes or overall rises in lookups occur.
One reason we may see an overall rise in searches is that people see an existing word used in a new way and they want to understand what it means.
Usually, we stay ahead of the trend and add these new meanings before people start looking for them. However, quarantine took us by surprise. It was only when we had chosen it as Word of the Year 2020 that we realized a new meaning had emerged during that year. It used to be used only for specific periods where people or animals had to be kept away from others, for example after travel, or due to an infectious disease:
Owners risk having to leave their pets abroad or put them in quarantine if they fail to follow the rules.
However, during the pandemic, especially in the US, people started to use quarantine to mean lockdown:
I’ve been doing a lot of baking during quarantine.
Some years we see spikes in searches for a particular word. These spikes can occur over a week, or just one day.
Sometimes the reason for a spike is immediately clear: In 2021, the spike in searches for perseverance in mid-February could clearly be linked to the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. But when, in 2022, we noticed that over 65,000 people had searched for the word homer in one single day in May, we were perplexed. It was only when we found spikes for a number of other five-letter words that we knew the answer had to be Wordle.
In 2023, hallucinate saw an overall rise in searches thanks to a new meaning added earlier that year related to AI, the hot topic of the moment.
We added a new meaning to another word in 2023 after seeing its usage shift from social media into mainstream news. And that word is the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year for 2024 – manifest!
What do you think about our decade of Words of the Year? Would you have chosen different words?
