Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word Of The Year Is All About Staying True

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There’s no one word that can define the whirlwind that has been 2023, but Merriam-Webster has tried, just as it has done every other year. The dictionary’s much-anticipated 2023 Word of the Year is “authentic,” a term that reverberates even louder amid the age of artificial intelligence and a time when truth and fiction become harder to separate.

“Authentic” became the word to fixate on after the dictionary noticed an uptick in searches for it throughout the year. Its selection arrives at a time when authenticity is often seen as a performance.

Advances in tools like AI art generators have made it trickier to tell if an image is a photo or an illustration. To keep up, tech giants like Adobe and Microsoft have developed a transparency label that follows photos around the web to trace them back to their creators and origins. In partnership with Adobe, Leica has launched a camera with this mark, called ‘Content Credentials’, embedded into photos. 

“The rise of AI helped drive interest in the word,” explains Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large. “The line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred. As a result, in social media and marketing, authentic has become the gold standard for building trust—and authenticity, ironically, has become a performance.”

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There is a collective effort to connect with simpler, more genuine versions of ourselves. On social media, people carefully edit their lives, reflecting a version they prefer rather than the one they live with every day.

“Authentic” has more than one meaning, the dictionary points out. Besides describing something that’s “not false or imitation,” it also reflects attributes “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character,” and “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

Merriam-Webster has also named some other words that drew considerable attention in 2023.

Among them is “deepfake,” which, interestingly, saw a bump in April when Tesla’s lawyers argued that past evidence of CEO Elon Musk waxing lyrical about cars’ self-driving capabilities could have been digitally doctored. The word garnered interest again in May and June with the surfacing of inauthentic advertisements portraying Donald Trump, Ryan Reynolds, and other celebrities. 

Another popular word this year, “dystopian,” led to a spike in queries on Earth Day as temperatures hit a record high, and later on, when discussions on the regulation of AI picked up.

“Coronation” became a big word in May as King Charles III, the oldest monarch to be crowned, officially took the throne.

“Rizz,” a slang term popularized on TikTok, joins the clique. According to the dictionary, which added the word in September, it means having “romantic appeal or charm.”

Finally, there was a great deal of curiosity surrounding the word or letter “X” in July, when Twitter underwent its controversial rebrand.

Glaringly absent is “moist,” the word that Kraft Real Mayo petitioned to christen as the 2023 Word of the Year.

[via CNN and Bloomberg, images via Dreamstime.com]