“New words catch on when they capture our imagination, or fill a hole with a word for a concept we need to express,” Katherine Connor Martin, product director at Oxford Languages, said in a telephone interview. “What ‘goblin mode’ tells me is it resonated with the feeling that the pandemic is over, but we’re still grappling with it. Do we want to go back to the notions of respectability of the prepandemic world?”
The Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from Oxford’s continually updated corpus of more than 19 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world. The selection, according to Oxford, is meant “to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the preceding year, while also having “potential as a term of lasting cultural significance.”
Normally, Oxford’s lexicographers assemble a list of words that had a statistically relevant surge, then choose one. This year, they took a more populist approach, announcing a short list of three — “goblin mode,” “#IStandWith” and “metaverse” — and then throwing it to a two-week online public vote.
“Having a group of people in Oxford choose it always felt weirdly undemocratic,” Martin said. “And this year, when people are talking about democracy as a thing that might be under threat, it didn’t feel like the right approach.”
The inclusion of “goblin mode” drew some consternation, as the Not Very Online went scrambling to Google. But for some, it was the clear winner — or at least the lesser of three evils.
The Word of the Year Goes Goblin Mode
