‘GASLIGHTING’ NAMED WORD OF THE YEAR

“Gaslighting” — behavior that’s mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Lookups for the word on Merriam-Webster.com increased 1,740% in 2022 from the year before. But something else happened. There wasn’t a single event that drove significant spikes in curiosity, as usually happens with the word of the year. Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based solely on data.