Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2015

Merriam-Webster declares 'ism' as word of the year for 2015

By LEANNE ITALIE

Dec. 15, 2015 

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By: LEANNE ITALIE (AP)

NEW YORK - Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. 

NEW YORK (AP) — Merriam-Webster has picked a small but powerful suffix as word of the year: ism.
But not just any ism. The top isms to earn high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on the dictionary company's website in 2015 over the year before are socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism.

"We had a lot on our minds this year," mused Peter Sokolowski, the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company's editor at large, in a recent interview. "It's a serious year. These are words of ideas and practices. We're educating ourselves."

Pinpointing reasons why words go on the run at Merriam-Webster is an educated guess. The dictionary company tracks corresponding news events to link lookups to real life. And its researchers also crunch data in a way that filters out common words frequently looked up year after year after year when making their top annual choices.
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