‘Post-Truth’ Named 2016 Word of the Year
“Post-Truth” is Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year.
The Oxford Dictionaries website told readers post-truth could be “one of the defining words of our time.”
The term comes from an idea that became popular during the 2016 election in the United States.
Post-truth, as the website defines it, means to relate to situations where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Oxford Dictionaries officials say they chose post-truth as Word of the Year because of its popularity. They said the term’s usage appeared to increase 2,000% in 2016 alone.
Casper Grathwohl is the president of Oxford Dictionaries. He said that the choice was no surprise.
He also said post-truth has become popular at a time when more people are using social media to get news.
Post-truth, with its current meaning, has existed for more than 20 years.
Oxford Dictionaries found its first use in a 1992 commentary published in The Nation magazine. Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American playwright, used “post-truth” in writing about the Iran-Contra scandal and the Gulf War.
“We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world,” he wrote.
