Why is Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year ‘authentic’?
In a year of the emergence of artificial intelligence, “deepfakes and post-truth,” the word of the year as declared by Merriam-Webster is “authentic.”
“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, said in an exclusive interview given to The Associated Press. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
PBS reported that the word was increasingly searched on the dictionary website throughout 2023.
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Why is ‘authentic’ the 2023 word of the year?
Among the dictionary’s 500,000 “most-looked-up” words this year, “authentic” was among the entries.
NPR reported that in congruence with the word choice of this year, “celebrities like Prince Harry and Britney Spears sought to tell their own stories.”
Even the increasing popularity of the BeReal social media app has encouraged the masses to be more “authentic” despite the app inevitably showing the “impossibility of authentic social media,” according to The Cornell Daily Sun.
“We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself,” Sokolowski said.
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What other words were considered for 2023 word of the year?
Merriam-Webster reported that some of the other words that were standouts in the running for the 2023 word of the year were:
Rizz: “Romantic appeal or charm.”
Deepfake: “An mage or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”
Coronation: “The literal act of placing a crown on a monarch’s head.”
Dystopian: “A dark potential future that typifies the imagined world or society that dystopian so often calls to mind.”
EGOT: “An entertainer that has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.”
X: “Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter as X.”
Implode: “Something that implodes or bursts inward or undergoes violent compression.”
