How Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year went from Latin to brainrot-maxxing: All 17 picks

In 2011, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year was a five-syllable Latin word most people needed to look up. In 2026, it’s a gamer suffix with a spare X. That’s the whole story of the last fifteen years of English, and honestly, of us.

(Quick math before the pedants arrive: Dictionary.com started naming a Word of the Year in 2010, with change*. Tergiversate was its second pick. So this story covers all 17 winners, from 2010 to 2026. We just start the punchline in 2011, because* change is a terrible joke setup.)

Tergiversate means to keep changing your opinion on something. Dictionary.com picked it on purpose: An obscure word to roast a year of political flip-flopping. It was the lexicographers talking down to the room, chosen by experts to teach you something.

Maxxing means doing something to the absolute fullest. Proteinmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, looksmaxxing. Nobody needed a lexicographer to introduce it. Teenagers had already said it ten thousand times before the dictionary noticed.

Sigh, a two-minute silence for times when the dictionary used to pick words to explain the news to us. Now it picks words to explain us to the news.

And here's thing: The two words are secretly about the same thing. One is about flip-flopping on what you want. The other is about wanting all of it, all the time, optimised. Fifteen years later, we’re still not sure what we want. We just want more of it.

Dictionary.com crowned its first Word of the Year in 2010, so the 2000s are a lexical black hole of flip phones and frosted tips.

Read them in order and you get the strangest autobiography ever written. It opens with presidential slogans and SAT vocabulary. It passes through a long, grim middle of surveillance, outbreaks and fake news. Then, somewhere around 2024, there's just a lot of sounds and numbers.

Here’s the decade-and-a-half, and you can start feeling the pain in your lower back.

The early years read like a dictionary trying to sound smart at a dinner party.

2010: change. The debut pick, which CNN described as a referendum on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan and whether enough had actually changed. Bonus trivia from Dictionary.com’s archive: the readers’ People’s Choice that year was epic, as in “epic fail.” The people have always been like this.

2011: tergiversate. To change your opinions repeatedly. Most people had never seen it before, which was the point. It was the theme of the year, and the dictionary gave it a word you could win Scrabble with.

2012: bluster. One word, two meanings, both very 2012.

2013: privacy. TIME noted that Dictionary.com built its case on 30 privacy stories from that year, led by Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance. Google Glass and shifting tech privacy policies rounded out the list, per EPIC. It beat cronut.

Then the mood darkened.

2014: exposure. The Ebola outbreak put “exposure” in every headline. From there it stretched to cover anything being revealed that someone wished hadn’t been. A word for a year of uncomfortable reveals.

2015: identity. Conversations about racial identity dominated the year, and the site added a wave of related terms. A big, serious word for a big, serious debate.

2016: xenophobia. Lookups jumped around the Brexit vote that June and kept climbing through a bruising election season. The dictionary did not pick a cheerful word. The year did not offer one.

2017: complicit. The first spike came the day after Saturday Night Live aired a mock perfume ad called “Complicit,” with Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump (Globe and Mail). The second came in April, when the real Ivanka Trump told CBS she didn’t know what it meant to be complicit. The third came after Senator Jeff Flake’s retirement speech (MPR/AP). A word that got famous because someone said they didn’t know it. Dictionary.com, ever helpful, did.

By now the list had a vibe, and the vibe was “please send help.” CNN, writing in 2018, called the run of picks a depressing annual shorthand for history. It was about to get worse before it got better.

2018: misinformation. False information spread without necessarily meaning to deceive. The cousin disinformation means to. The year of forwarding things you shouldn’t have.

2019: existential. The “existential threat” was everywhere: climate, politics, you name it. If 2019 had a facial expression, it was staring into the middle distance.

2020: pandemic .Lookups spiked more than 13,500% on March 11, the day the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and stayed sky-high all year. Pandemic baking, pandemic puppies, pandemic hair. Merriam-Webster picked the same word, a rare double. Even the dictionaries were too tired to argue.

2021: allyship. Supporting a marginalized group you’re not part of. It was a first for the list: Dictionary.com added the word to its dictionary that same year and then crowned it. Joined the club and won the club championship in one season.

And then there's a shift.

2022: woman. Searches surged after a senator asked Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word during her confirmation hearing. It stayed central through a year of debate over women’s rights at home and abroad. Proof that the simplest words can carry the heaviest arguments.

2023: hallucinate. The AI sense: when a chatbot confidently makes things up. It was the first Word of the Year about the machines rather than the humans.

2024: demure. The pivot point. Creator Jools Lebron’s “very demure, very mindful” TikToks went viral in August. Usage jumped nearly 1,200%, and site searches hit 200 times their usual level. It beat brat, brainrot and weird. A 700-year-old word, rescued by a TikTok and handed a crown.

Fun fact: Over at Oxford, the same year’s winner was ‘brain rot.’ Demure on the outside, brain rot on the inside.

2025: 67. Pronounced “six-seven,” never “sixty-seven.” It’s Gen Alpha slang tied to Skrilla’s song “Doot Doot,” shouted with a palms-up juggling gesture, and banned in more than a few classrooms. Even Dictionary.com admitted it was still working out what it means. Shortlist casualties included aura farming, clanker and Gen Z stare. Fourteen years earlier, the winner was tergiversate. Let that sit.

2026: maxxing. Announced just this week, on October 26. It’s short for maximizing; bolt it onto anything to mean going all out: gymmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, cozymaxxing. Media use in August 2026 ran nearly 19 times the 2025 monthly average, and looksmaxxing alone rose more than 1,000%. It has a messy past. On one side is the gaming term min-maxing; on the other, looksmaxxing’s roots in 2010s forums. It beat affordability, data center, odyssey and unc. Yes, unc. If you know, you’re probably one.

The words got shorter, the coiners got younger, and the experts went from setting the syllabus to taking notes in the back row.

So here’s our 2027 forecast. The winner will be under four letters, have no vowels, and mean three contradictory things at once. It will be invented in a school cafeteria, banned by a principal by Tuesday, and on a Dictionary.com shortlist by October. Every adult will pronounce it wrong. That’s how you’ll know it’s working.

Until then, stay demure, keep maxxing, stop asking what 67 means, and whatever you do, don’t tergiversate. You’ll only have to look it up again.