Merriam-Webster's 2019 Word of the Year is 'they.'
Searches for the singular pronoun "they" — commonly used to refer to gender nonbinary people — have soared 313 percent this year, Merriam-Webster revealed.Dec. 10, 2019, 2:58 PM UTCMerriam-Webster's 2019 Word of the Year is"they" — the singular pronoun that has gained popularity as a way to refer to nonbinary people who identify as neither exclusively male nor female.
The decision, which was entirely data-driven and announced on Tuesday morning, came after lookups of the word trended all year, according to the dictionary's editors. “Pronouns are among the language's most commonly used words, and like other common words they tend to be mostly ignored by dictionary users,” Emily Brewster, senior editor at Merriam-Webster, said in a statement. “But over the past year or so, as people have increasingly encountered the nonbinary use, we've seen searches for ‘they’ grow dramatically.”
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