According to their very own website, which I suspect we can believe, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016 is “post-truth” - which tells you quite a lot about the beating honesty took over the year (or not).
The frequency of the word sky-rocketed towards the end of the year as the American presidential election started to drift away into “alternative facts” (surely a candidate for word of the year 2017), fake news (another), fact-checking, outrage and suspicion.
Other words on their shortlist which reflect the times in which we live are “alt-right” (a political conservative movement, not a music genre), “chatbot” (which is a computer program designed to converse with humans) and “Brexiteer” (which sounds like a British musketeer - the truth is, I fear, rather more mundane). Another interesting entry is “adulting”, which means “the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult”. We now need a word for that!
Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, chose “surreal” as their word for 2016, for which searches rose dramatically after various surprises and tragedies over the past year. The word gained traction after the overthrow attempt in Turkey, the Brexit vote and the American election.
Other popular words listed by the American dictionary include revenant, icon, and bigly. “Revenant”, meaning “one who returns from the death”, was driven by the DiCaprio film of the same name, while the upsurge in “icon” was triggered by the death of Prince (or Symbol or the Artist Previously known as Prince, etc). He is now the icon previously known as Symbol, which is all very graphic.
“Bigly” is a bit of a red herring. It became popular after many people thought U.S. President-elect Donald Trump used the word during a presidential debate. This prompted furious debate about whether the word actually existed and whether Trump had, in fact, used it. Many language experts agreed that Trump had probably said “big league”, but that “bigly” actually does exist (although it is very seldom, if ever, used). Please don’t use it. It’s “so sad”, another phrase which Donald Trump has gifted to late-night talk-show hosts.
Dictionary.com has chosen “xenophobia” as its Word of the Year, meaning “fear or hatred of foreigners”. Put it together with “Brexit”, events in the USA and local elections throughout Europe and a picture starts to emerge which is, to use a popular phrase, “so sad” indeed.