Cambridge Dictionary’s 2022 Word Of The Year Left ‘Wordle’ Fans Seething

Has your daily Wordle habit helped expand your vocabulary this year? Well, for Cambridge Dictionary, the game certainly inspired the editors’ choice for its word of the year. 

The word: “Homer”—an informal American English term for a home run in baseball. If you’ve never chanced upon this term before, you’re not alone. 

It was also the answer to the online puzzle on May 5, and left players seething when they couldn’t arrive at the solution in as few guesses as possible. Incidentally, there were over 65,000 searches on the dictionary’s online page just that day alone, and overall, the word was looked up over 75,000 times in 2022.

Players who weren’t familiar with the word were left “feeling confused and frustrated,” explained the site, adding that “tens of thousands” of Wordle gamers “took to the Cambridge Dictionary to understanding the meaning of the word.” 

Interestingly, “homer” wasn’t the only five-letter word that saw a huge spike in searches this year. Among the most-searched terms were “humor,”  (presumably looked up by readers from outside the US who were used to spelling it as “humour”), “caulk,” “tacit,” and “bayou”—yes, all words from Wordle.

“Perhaps it’s no wonder that people enjoy the focus and mental challenge of a simple word game that can be a shared experience with family and friends, whether they’re physically together or not, at a time of volatility and prolonged recovery from a global pandemic. Even the complaints about the choice of words seem to be part of the fun,” muses Wendalyn Nichols of the Cambridge Dictionary. 

Want to dive deeper into the word of the year? Head here for more information on how the site conducts its investigations into the meanings of a term. 

[via Gizmodo and Cambridge Dictionary, cover image via Cambridge Dictionary]