I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, December 29th.

It's that time of year for top 10 lists, of course, but also word of the year time. And not surprisingly, two of the three

choices so far are pandemic related from the big dictionaries. Merriam Webster picked vaccine,

while Oxford picked Vax. Is that a noun versus verb thing? But dictionary.com went a whole different

way. Their word is

allyship. So to find out more about some of the key words of this year and what goes into

these selections, we're joined by Ben Zimmer, who happens to have a lot of words in his title. He's

a linguist, a lexicographer, the language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, a contributing

writer for the Atlantic,

co-host of the Slate podcast, Spectacular, Vernacular,

and chair of the American Dialect Society, the ADS, their new words committee, that is.

He's chair of that committee and oversees their word of the year selection process.

Woo!

Welcome back to the show,

Ben Zimber. Happy New Year. Hi, happy New Year, Brian. Let's start with vaccine versus Vax,

the Miriam Webster and Oxford choices. In some ways, they're the same word, but as a linguist and lexicographer, how significant is the difference between them?

Yeah, it was interesting to see that those two major dictionary publishers chose roughly similar words, not exactly the same.

The way that Merriam-Webster decides its word is, it's looking primarily at the lookup data.

What words are people looking up the most and what has seen a sort of a spike

in interest over the past year? And Merriam-Webster saw a big, big uptick with vaccine and shows that

as their word of the year. For Oxford, they use a different choice that still, you know, they still take a data-driven approach, but they're actually looking at a big corpus of text.

They're able to sort of monitor the way that people are using language based on gathering up millions of words of text that people are using online.

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