CP – Merriam-Webster announced Tuesday that the word “they” was its “Word of the Year for 2019,” mainly due to the news it garnered as a term used by individuals who identify as gender nonconforming. In an announcement, Merriam-Webster said “they” was the most-looked-up word this year, with the dictionary company noting that the word saw a 313 percent increase in lookups in 2019 compared to last year. “English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence,
they have been used for this purpose for over 600 years,” Merriam-Webster explained. “More recently, though, they have also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers.” Merriam-Webster went on to note that the nonbinary use of “they” was added to their dictionary in September and highlighted multiple news items fostering searches for the word. READ MORE
