We admit, sometimes we don’t know what’s real or what’s fake anymore. In a world where disinformation thrives, artificially generated content looks just like the real thing, and celebrities and social media influencers peddle (ironically) fake authenticity, it’s hard to know what to believe.
Which is why it’s so fitting that ‘authentic’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. To arrive at this pick, the dictionary looked at page hits and popular searches on its website. While interest in the word ‘authentic’ has always been high, it found a significant increase in searches for the word this year.
Merriam-Webster connects this trend to several key moments in 2023. Examples include the rise of Elon Musk’s X, which has faced controversy for disinformation; the recent popularity of platforms like BeReal, which market themselves as tools to capture ‘real’ moments; statements by celebrities like Taylor Swift and Sam Smith about seeking their “authentic self”; and ongoing conversations about ChatGPT, deepfakes, and other AI-generated content that blur the line between reality and fantasy.
It’s a fitting follow-up to 2022’s word of the year, ‘gaslighting’ – pointing to an era where our sense of reality is increasingly warped, and the way people present themselves is increasingly performative. We think that by asking Merriam-Webster what ‘authentic’ means, people are really asking, “what does it mean to be authentic?”
These are the other words that stood out in Merriam-Webster’s 2023 data, in no particular order:
- Rizz
- Deepfake:
- Coronation
- Dystopian
- EGOT
- X
- Implode
- Doppelgänger
- Covenant
- Indict
- Kibbutz
- Deadname
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