From gaslighting to permacrisis, what Word of the Year picks say about 2022, and the one that offers a ray of hope

Permacrisis, the Collins English Dictionary word of the year, sums up the instability and catastrophe of recent years

Merriam-Webster’s pick, gaslighting, is a logical follow-on from WOTYs such as post-truth and fake news. Australian dictionary editors struck a positive note

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Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in a scene from the 1944 film “Gaslight”, from which the word gaslighting - the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s 2022 Word of the Year - is derived. Photo: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Lisa Lim has held professoriate positions at universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Perth, including as Head of the School of English at the University of Hong Kong.

Published: 5:06pm, 7 Dec 2022

As the last for 2022, this column, as is tradition, surveys the Word of the Year (WOTY), as announced by dictionaries and other language-related bodies.

Being words or phrases judged by analysis, committee or poll to have been one of the most highly searched, prominent, or notable for that year, WOTY candidates and winners provide a good snapshot of the concerns of the world – and several of this year’s picks make for depressing, though unsurprising, reading.

Given that recent years’ WOTYs include Brexit (Collins English Dictionary, 2016), climate emergency (Oxford Languages, 2019), pandemic (Merriam-Webster, 2020), lockdown (Collins, 2020), doomscrolling (Macquarie Dictionary, 2020) and insurrection (American Dialect Society, 2021), it is perhaps inevitable that we would find ourselves in a “permacrisis” – Collins’ pick for 2022.

This word captures our experience of the past few years of an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.

People take part in a recent protest in New York against the Chinese government’s “zero-Covid” policy. The Covid emergency, and insecurity and instability around the world, led Collins English Dictionary to choose permacrisis as its 2022 Word of the Year. Photo: Reuters

Contributing to such a permacrisis is our existence in an age of misinformation: already in 2016, “post-truth” was Oxford Dictionaries’ WOTY while “fake news” was Macquarie’s 2016 WOTY and the 2017 WOTY of both Collins and the American Dialect Society.