Merriam-Webster Names “Authentic” as Word of the Year for 2023
The wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster have announced that the official “Word of the Year for 2023” is “authentic.” They say that this word is something we are “thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more” than ever before.
According to the dictionary, the most common definitions of authentic are “not false or imitation,” “being true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character,” and “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”
Merriam-Webster also reports that the word saw a “substantial increase” in lookups this year. This is likely due to the fact that we now live in a world where artificial intelligence, deepfake technology, and questionable memes challenge our basic notions of reality.
Authenticity has become a valuable commodity, especially in a time when influencers build their brands on social media while trying to seamlessly promote products. With the average person scrolling through over 43 feet of content every day on social media, it has become easier to spot those who are genuine from those who are not.
“When we look at common threads across the thousands of influencer marketing campaigns we’ve run at The Outloud Group over the last 15 years, the similarity between all of our best-performing brand creator partnerships is pretty simple: true authenticity,” writes Bradley Hoos, CEO of The Outland Group, a full-service influencer marketing agency, in Forbes.
Merriam-Webster adds that authenticity is a trait that people have been striving to find for themselves in 2023.
The dictionary also highlighted other words that trended in 2023, including “Rizz” (Internet slang for “romantic appeal or charm” or “to charm, seduce”), “deepfake” (altered images or recordings that convincingly misrepresent someone’s actions or words), “coronation” (the crowning of a new British monarch, King Charles III), “dystopian,” calling it a verb applied to frightening real-world issues and used to describe the trend in video games, books, and movies depicting a dark future.
Other notable words from 2023 include “THE EGO,” “X,” “implode,” and “doppelgänger.”
It seems that these words reflect the current cultural climate and the challenges we face in discerning truth from fiction in various aspects of our lives.
With the rapid changes in the way we communicate and consume information, it will be interesting to see what words will capture our attention in the coming year.