From Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover to the legalization of same-sex marriage to the racial switch of America's forefathers in "Hamilton," 2015's headlines revolved around gender, sexuality, and race.
So it's only fitting that Dictionary.com's word of the year is "identity." It's a far cry from the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year, which wasn't even a word (it was the 😂 emoji).
The site saw a surge in searches for words like "microaggression," "omnisexual," and the gender neutral honorific "Mx."
Dictionary.com also added a few identity-related words, like "code-switching," or changing one's behavior or appearance to adapt to societal norms, and the verb form of "identify," or to associate oneself with a group or belief system.
The biggest stories of 2015 were tied to identity, leading to more interest in these terms, Liz McMillan, CEO of Dictionary.com, said in a press release. "The trends that we saw linguistically all point to a larger shift in the way society thinks about identity as being more fluid," she said.
All of these terms, under the umbrella of "identity," acknowledge the gray areas of the human experience. In 2015, perhaps we've begun to better understand our own nuanced identities.
