Feminism is named word of the year by Merriam-Webster

Lookups for feminism increased 70 percent over 2016 on Merriam-Webster.com, the dictionary says. The searches coincided  Marches in January and the recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations against celebrities as reasons for their choice.

The dictionary defines feminism as both “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”

In a press release, Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor says: “No one word can ever encapsulate all the news, events or stories of a given year”

“But when we look back at the past twelve months and combine an analysis of words that have been looked up much more frequently than during the previous year along with instances of intense spikes of interest because of news events, we see that one word stands out in both categories.”

“It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly seems to be very pro-abortion. I’m neither anti-male or pro-abortion. There’s an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choices. … I look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances. And to me, that’s what conservative feminism is all about,” Conway says.

Also cited is the entertainment industry as a possible reason for the spike in searches for the word. The dictionary cited the popularity of the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale and the blockbuster film Wonder Woman.

Feminism’s roots are in the Latin for “woman” and the word “female,” which dates to 14th century English, Sokolowski told Fox News. It was first entered in the dictionary in 1841 by the founder, Noah Webster.

“It was a very new word at that time,” Sokolowski says. “His definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today. His definition was, ‘The qualities of females.’

“so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness. We do see evidence that the word was used in the 19th century in a medical sense, for the physical characteristics of a developing teenager, before it was used as a political term, if you will.”

Webster added the word in revisions to his ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language.’ They were his last. He died in 1843. He also added the word terrorism that year.

“We had no idea he was the original dictionary source of feminism. We don’t have a lot of evidence of what he was looking at,” Sokolowski says.

Merriam-Webster cited nine runners-up that experienced significant increases in lookups, including “complicit,” which rival Dictionary.com recently named its word of the year.

Another frequently searched-for word was “dotard,” an antiquated term for an elderly person with senility. That word captured the world’s attention in September, when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un referred to President Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

Also on the list was “syzygy,” defined as “the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and Earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system”; searches for the word were inspired by the total solar eclipse across much of the U.S. in August.