‘Gaslighting’ Is Merriam-Webster’s 2022 Word Of The Year

ACROSS AMERICA — Merriam-Webster on Monday announced “gaslighting” as its 2022 Word of the Year. Lookups of the word are up 1740 percent so far this year, with someone searching for its meaning at least once a day, the dictionary company said.

Also on the list: oligarch, omicron, codify, LGBTQIA, sentient, loamy, raid and Queen Consort.

For explanations of why, just look at the past year’s headlines.

Gaslighting showed up plenty of times. More egregious than a lie, gaslighting is a driver of disorientation and mistrust, defined in the dictionary as an “act or practice of grossly misleading someone else especially for one’s own advantage.”

“It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday's unveiling.

Gaslighting is a heinous tool frequently used by abusers in relationships — and by politicians and other newsmakers. It can happen between romantic partners, within a broader family unit and among friends. It can be a corporate tactic, or a way to mislead the public. In “medical gaslighting,” a health care professional dismisses a patient's symptoms or illness as “all in your head.”

“Gaslighting” has been used since the opening of the 1938 play “Gas Light,” a thriller about a marriage based on deceit and a husband determined to driving his wife insane, so he can steal from her. Among his trickery: He caused the gas lights to dim, but insisted to his wife the lights were not dimming and that she couldn’t trust her own perceptions.

Until recent election cycles, the word was used to describe the kind of deception portrayed in the play and movie — the “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator,” according to Merriam-Webster.

The current iteration responds to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.”

It is among a class of words used to describe modern forms of deceit and manipulation that include fake news, deepfake and artificial intelligence. Gaslighting is not a simple act of lying, which Merriam-Webster said tends to occur between individuals, but a deliberate conspiracy to mislead, which tends to involve organizations. The word is used in both personal and political contexts.

That brings us to “oligarch,” a Greek word that literally means “rule by the few.” Word lookups spiked 621 percent in early March 2022 after the U.S. and U.K. governments placed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and their families after Russia invaded Ukraine.

As it specifically relates to Russia and other countries that succeeded the Soviet Union, oligarch refers to “one of a class of individuals who through private acquisition of state assets amassed great wealth that is stored especially in foreign accounts and properties and who typically maintain close links to the highest government circles,” according to Merriam-Webster.

Lookups for “omicron,” the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, spiked in early January after the World Health Organization used it to refer to the most recent variant of the coronavirus, which became the dominant strain of COVID-19. Lookups surged again in November, with reports the omicron booster was not significantly more effective than older COVID-19 vaccines.

Lookups for “codify,” which means “to make a code” and is essentially a synonym of “law,” surged both before after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Lookups increased 5347 percent after the May 3 leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that ultimately overturned Roe. Lookups were up 1293 percent with the Supreme Court’s June 24 decision, and up 8304 percent on June 30 when President Joe Biden endorsed ending the Senate filibuster in order to codify the right to an abortion.

Also:

Lookups of the acronym “LGBTQIA” — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (one’s sexual or gender identity), intersex and asexual/aromantic/agender — spiked during the entire month of June, Pride month, and again in November after a shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. Overall, lookups increased 800 percent over 2021.

Lookups for “sentient” increased 480 percent in June after a Google engineer supposedly claimed the company’s AI chat bot had developed human-like consciousness. Google vehemently denied the claim and put the engineer on paid leave, but the topic of how human-like AI is continued to be a hot topic.

Lookups for “loamy” — a word that means “consisting of loam, a soil consisting of a friable mixture of varying proportions of clay, silt and sand” — surged 4.5 million percent on Aug. 29 when it was an answer to a puzzle in the game Quordle, which gives players nine guesses to identify four words. Another Quordle answer, “voilà,” inspired a lookup spike of 2.5 million percent.

The word “raid” saw a 970 percent spike in lookups after the FBI executed a search warrant at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in early August. Some labeled the search a “raid,” or “a sudden invasion by officers of the law,” to suggest the search was unfair. Lookups continued to spike in the coming month. Lookups for an associated word, “trove,” used by journalists to describe the 33 boxes of documents, were up 344 percent for the year. Also, lookups for “banana republic,” a small and despotically run country, were up 3750 percent after some defenders of the former president used that as a comparison to the U.S. government.

Finally, “Queen Consort,” the title given to King Charles’ wife, shot to the top of lookups following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September. Other terms that were among the most looked up during that time included “pomp and circumstance” and “monarch.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.