'Post-truth' declared Oxford Dictionaries's word of the year
It is defined as an adjective 'denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion'.
Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” its 2016 international word of the year in the context of the “highly-charged” developments that included Brexit and the United States’ presidential elections, BBC reported. The use of the word increased by 2,000% in 2016 as against 2015. The word has been described as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
Oxford Dictionaries’s word of the year aims to “reflect the passing year in language”. The publisher’s United States and United Kingdom teams agreed on designating the same word with the title, The Guardian reported.
Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl said, “Given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time,” The Guardian reported. The publisher said the word is believed to have first been used in 1992.
