Word(s) of the Year

Every year, Word Nerd posts the words featured by dictionaries and linguists as the Word of the Year.

This year, according to Dictionary.com, the word of 2011 was "tergiversate." According to the Huffington Post article on the pick, "tergiversate" means “to change repeatedly one's attitude or opinions with respect to a cause, subject, etc.; equivocate.” They picked it to sum up what happened in 2011, and it's a pretty good pick. The whole article is here. 


In hunting up this year-defining word, I found this great list at M-W.com of the Words of the Year, providing a little bit of context of why this word became a flash-in-the-2011 pan.


It's a little bit like a Word a Day calendar, because theses words and phrases are all good ones. Hopefully, you too will recognize many of them from 9th-grade vocabulary quiz days, and if not, learn a few.