Each year, Oxford University Press picks a “Word of the Year”. This is done by a team of people who look at real language data to see which words have been used the most. They choose around 30-40 words and then analyze them to see which one should be the word of the year. The final word is picked from this shortlist.
One indicator that a word may be a good candidate is if it has had a spike in usage that year. The team then looks at why this is happening. The “Word of the Year” is not necessarily included in the dictionary.
The team at Oxford University Press marks potential words throughout the year. When it’s time to pick the word of the year, they gather these together and go through the process of analyzing them. This helps them to narrow down the list to a few top contenders, from which they choose the final word of the year.
