In the era of hyperfakes and post-truth and while artificial intelligence is developing and Elon Musk has transformed Twitter into zeitgeist: authentic (authentic).
Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Searches for the word are high on the dictionary site, but they have reached new heights throughout the year, editor-in-chief Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
“In 2023 we are witnessing a sort of crisis of authenticity,” he said before Monday’s announcement. What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more. »
Mr. Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into why people turn to dictionaries and websites looking for specific words. Instead, they look for data on search spikes and world events that correlate with them. This time around, there hasn’t been a particularly large increase at any one time, but a consistency in the increased interest in “authentic.”
It was the year of artificial intelligence, of course, but also a time when ChatGPT creator OpenAI suffered a leadership crisis. Taylor Swift and Prince Harry sought authenticity in their words and actions. Elon Musk himself, at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, urged business leaders, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “express themselves authentically” on social media by managing their own accounts.
“Can we be sure a student wrote this article?” Can we know if a politician made this statement? We no longer always trust what we see,” Mr. Sokolowski emphasized.
“Sometimes we don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We now recognize that authenticity is a performance in itself. »
“Authentic” follows the choice of “ gaslighting » in 2022. And 2023 marks the 20e anniversary of Merriam-Webster’s choice of word of the year.
The company’s data analysts filter out persistent words like “love,” which are still highly searched among the 500,000 words it defines online. This year, analysts also filtered out many five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site for searches when playing the daily games, Mr. Sokolowski said.
Mr. Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a string of finalists for word of the year that have also attracted unusual traffic. Among them are “X” (searches increased in July after Mr. Musk rebranded Twitter), “EGOT” (it got a boost in February when Viola Davis gained that rare status of quadruple awarded at galas) and “ Elemental », the title of a new Pixar film which caused searches to jump in June.