It’s that time of the year again when you’re patiently waiting for your Spotify Wrapped, your YouTube Music Recap and, for some of us logophiles, the Word of The Year. To explain (my favourite pun), every year, dictionaries from across the globe release their word of the year. Many things determine the choice of word, but in recent years, social media has dictated, nay, influenced (see what I did there?) words of the year.

The tradition’s origins vary, but it’s widely believed to have begun in the 1970s in Germany when a professor named Broder Carstensen launched a word list of his own—that of the year’s newest, most original, most popular, and most current words. Then, in the 1990s, a professor of English at the now-defunct MacMurray College in Illinois, Allan Metcalf, inspired by Time Magazine’s Person of The Year, had an idea: Why couldn’t the American Dialect Society, an organisation where he served as executive secretary, have a word of the year? His idea was a big hit with the other members, and on 19 December 1990, the word ‘bushlips’ became the first word of the year in the US. It means insincere political rhetoric and was a portmanteau of the words ‘Bush’ and ‘lips’ and was about then US President George H.W. Bush’s failed promise of no new taxes. 

Dictionary.com defines their word of the year as “a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year.” They’ve already chosen their word of the year and it’s very mindful and cutesy. Their word of the year, if you haven’t guessed or don’t speak TikTok, is ‘demure’.

The word had quite a year after a TikTok beauty influencer, Jools Lebron, posted a viral video on 5 August 2024, highlighting how she looked for work. “You see how I do my make-up for work? Very demure, very mindful,” Lebron said to her now 2.3 million followers. 



“Very demure, very mindful” quickly went viral, with celebrities and brands hopping onto the trend. “At the peak of the trend, demure had 200 times more searches on Dictionary.com than it did on dates preceding August,” reported the site. 

Other words the site considered for word of the year included 

🔹Brainrot. It is defined as “the effects of spending too much time-consuming low-quality content on social media. The term also refers to the low-quality content itself.”

🔹 Brat became famous when the musician Charli XCX tweeted that outgoing US vice president Kamala Harris, who ran for president but lost to Donald Trump, was ‘brat’. It’s a reclaiming of the word and now means “someone who is confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant.”

🔹 Extreme Weather also made the list due to the growing threat of global warming and the hectic weather the globe has experienced in 2024. “The year 2024 saw a continued increase of the term extreme weather in web searches. In January 2024, for example, extreme weather was searched for 70% more than it was in January 2023,” said Dictionary.com.

As we head into the holidays, more and more words of the year will emerge, showing how we’ve enjoyed words this year and what we’ve been saying. In Mzansi, we’ve only had a word of the year from 2023, courtesy of the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), and that word was ‘Kuningi,’ which is an isiZulu word meaning “it’s a lot.” There is no word yet (hahaha) on this year’s word, but we won’t be too surprised should ‘demure’ make an appearance.