Press release from the American Dialect Society, “‘Occupy’ is the 2011 Word of the Year” (Jan. 6, 2012)
In its 22nd annual words of the year vote, with record attendance, the American Dialect Society voted “occupy” (verb, noun, and combining form referring to the Occupy protest movement) as the word of the year for 2011.
Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.
“It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement,” Zimmer said. “The movement itself was powered by the word.”
Read the rest here.