FOR REAL?

Merriam-Webster Word of the Year Is the Opposite of Fake

All around us everything is phony. So maybe that’s why we crave authenticity.

It’s been a year of artifice, of AI-generated deepfakes, blue-tick trolls, and post-truth politicking. Which makes Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year all the more surprising: “authentic.” The dictionary people make their choice from among the words that have been the most searched-for over the past 12 months, and “authentic” was consistently high-ranking—helped no doubt by the range of meanings attached to it. Nobody is quite sure why it’s done so well, but M-W editor at large Peter Sokolowski told the Associated Press he had an idea. “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”