Word for Word

Everyone relies on dictionaries to learn about words. We asked an expert what the words people look up say about them.

In 1996, Merriam-Webster, publisher of the most widely read dictionary in the United States, put its dictionary online. For the first time, the publisher had a way to tell what users were looking up and when they were doing it.

Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, tracks the words people look up.

Some words, regardless of when, just get looked up a lot. The top two are “affect” and “effect,” which are so close people look them up to remind themselves that “affect” is most often used as a verb (“How will that affect me?”) and “effect” is usually used as a noun (“What effect will that have on me?”).

But Sokolowski noticed that often there is a relationship between the words people look up and what is going on in the world. Following the death of Princess Diana, “suddenly ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ weren’t at the top of the list,” Sokolowski said. “What we noticed was an incredible amount of traffic around three words: “paparazzi” (photographers who follows famous people to take their pictures and then sell them to the media), “cortege” (a line of people or cars moving slowly at a funeral) and “princess” (perhaps because of confusion about the divorced Diana’s royal title). People were hearing these words in news coverage and going online to find out what they meant.

Since then, Sokolowski has tracked what’s on Americans’ minds by the words they’re looking up. In mid-March, there was a spike in the word “vernal” (of, relating to, or occurring in the spring) consistently used to describe the equinox on the 20th. Sometimes people are looking up familiar words to clarify their sense of the definition. In recent years, as states and judicial courts in the U.S. have debated laws for or against same-sex marriage, the word “marriage” has had an increased number of look-ups. And every February 14, Valentine’s Day, the most looked-up word is one most of us imagine we already know: “love.”

Sometimes a little deductive reasoning is needed to figure why look-ups of a word spike at a specific time of day. Why would an inordinate number of Americans in the evening hours be looking up the definition of an ethereal substance from Chinese philosophy? Furthermore, why would most of those searches originate from mobile phones? Sokolowski said that in the post-work hours, after Americans have stepped away from their desktop computers, many enjoy playing Scrabble. Away from their computers, they’re likely looking up “Xi” on their mobile phones in hopes of scoring an easy 11 points in the popular crossword game.

A Vocabulary Event

“The largest single ‘vocabulary event’ that I’ve witnessed since I’ve been watching these things,” said Sokolowski, “is the death of Michael Jackson, and six words tell this story over the course of three or four days. ‘Stricken’ [powerfully affected by disease, trouble, sorrow] was Saturday morning. ‘Resuscitate’ [to bring someone who is unconscious or close to death back to a conscious state again] was in the evening. ‘RIP’ [short for “rest in peace,” often written on a gravestone] was Sunday. ‘Condolences’ [feelings or expressions of sympathy and sadness] by Sunday night. ‘Icon’ [a widely known symbol] was the word used in all the obituaries, and ‘emaciated’ [very thin because of hunger or disease] came out in the news accounts of the reported condition of his body.”