Racial justice. Obstruction of justice. Social justice. The Justice Department. Merriam-Webster chose “justice” as its 2018 word of the year, driven by the churning news cycle over months and months, the Associated Press reports. Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, said “justice” consistently bubbled into the top 20 or 30 lookups on the company’s website, spiking at times due to specific events but also skating close to the surface for much of the year. While it’s a common word that people likely know how to spell and use correctly in a sentence, Sokolowski noted other reasons that drive search traffic. Among them is an attempt to focus a train of thought around a philosophical problem, or to seek aspirational motivation.
The designation of “justice” came ahead of a Senate vote on the “First Step Act,” a sentencing reform bill with broad bipartisan support. Sentencing for drug crimes, treatment for opioid addiction, a loosening of cannabis laws, and the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign, among other things, mean that justice will remain top of mind into the new year. “These are stories that connect to the culture and to society across races, across classes,” Sokolowski said. Searches for “justice” throughout the year, when compared to 2017, were up 74 percent on the site that has more than 100 million page views a month and nearly half a million entries, Sokolowski said. To be word-of-the-year worthy, an entry has to show both a high volume of traffic and a significant year-over-year increase in lookups. “We are not editorializing. We looked at our data and we were ourselves surprised by this word,” Sokolowski said. “This is a word that people have been thinking about for this entire year.”