Each year the Oxford Dictionary chooses a word of the year. Past years words have included vape, toxic and youthquake. So you get the idea. The words chosen illustrate a trend in language usage. Additionally, the words are chosen from a variety of categories. This year, Oxford decided to break from precedent and released a short list from a single category. The words included, climate denial, eco- anxiety and climate action. In the end, Oxford chose Climate Emergency as the word for 2019. Katherine Connor Martin, an editor at Oxford Dictionaries, told the New York Times, "The unusual decision to focus on climate-related terms reflected a “demonstrable escalation” in the language around climate. “When we were looking through the evidence, it was just clear that issues relating to the climate were running through all the different lexical items we were working with,” she said. “It reflects it was a real preoccupation of the English-speaking world in 2019.”
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