The Oxford Dictionaries have officially named post-truth the word of the year for 2016.
It is defined as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
“It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse,” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, said in a statement. “Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.”
The word became of particular relevance during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and the Brexit vote, which saw England shockingly vote to leave the European Union. According to Oxford, the earliest known use of post-truth was in 1992. However, it’s use spiked by 2000 percent in 2016.
“Given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time,” Grathwohl said.
Post-truth beat out a number of other words to become word of the year, including: woke, adulting, alt-right, chatbot, Brexiteer, coulrophobia, glass cliff, hygge and Latinx.