Hot on the heels of TIME Magazine naming the "Silence Breakers" of the "#MeToo" movement as 2017 Person of the Year, Merriam-Webster announced on Tuesday that its Word of the Year for 2017 is "feminism." Lookups for the word increased a whopping 70 percent compared to 2016, with interest in the word spiking due to events like the Women's March on Washington in January.
"The word feminism was being used in a kind of general way, the feminism of this big protest, but it was also used in a kind of specific way: What does it mean to be a feminist in 2017?" says Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski. "Those kinds of questions are the kinds of things, I think, that send people to the dictionary."
Coming in second behind feminism is "complicit," which Dictionary.com chose as its Word of the Year last month. The term achieved its first search spike after a March 12 Saturday Night Live sketch starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump. Rounding out Merriam-Webster's five most looked-up words for 2017 are "recuse," "empathy" and "dotard"--which North Korea's Kim Jong Un famously used to describe President Donald Trump