The words of 2012

The start of 2012 brought some typical words to the fore, with 'resolution' and 'prosperous' making meteoric jumps in the number of searches for each. But many people must have had a romantic start to the year, because 'cuddle' also became a very popular word to look up this time last year.

The second month of 2012 brought a more sober frame of mind, with words like 'bailout', 'hostile', 'grim' and 'fail' all getting huge upticks in searches on Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

In April, the phrasal verb 'give up' made a sudden appearance at the top of our most-searched-for list.

In July, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, which led to a resurgence of the use of the term 'god particle' to describe this elemental piece of the natural universe.

Older words come back to the fore with some frequency, but rarely with as much prominence as 'omnishambles' did. Originally appearing in a 2009 episode of the BBC TV series The Thick of It and meaning a complete and utter mess, it roared into vogue in 2012 when it developed traction in relation to political events in the UK in that life-imitating-art fashion. The adjective 'omnishambolic' also made its way into the lexicon.

Other words entering our most-searched were 'big data', for the collection of massive amounts of information online, especially about consumer behavior, and adverb 'automagically', which means independently, without effort and as if by magic.

Read the full write up on words of 2012 on the About Words blog from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online team here.

Friday, 21 December 2012