'Big Society' Chosen as Oxford University's Word of 2010
Every December a group of lexicographers sits down and argues about which words defined the year. The exercise looks frivolous and is not. It is one of the few public occasions when the machinery of language change is visible, and the choices tell you more about the year than most of the commentary written about it.
How "big society" won
The term big society was coined, and then hammered almost to death, by the British prime minister David Cameron and his coalition colleagues. Oxford's academics chose it as Word of the Year after what was reported as a sharp final tussle with vuvuzela and Boris bike.
Susie Dent of Oxford Dictionaries explained the decision in terms that hold up well over a decade later. The concept of big society, she said, was a clear winner because it embraced so much of the year's political and economic mood, and because it had begun to take on a life of its own. That last point is the actual criterion. A phrase becomes a word of the year not when it is used but when it escapes its author and gets used against him.
The shortlist as a snapshot
The runners-up did the same work in miniature. Vuvuzela carried a World Cup. Boris bike named a cycle hire scheme after a politician who had very little to do with designing it. Tweetup, simples, staycation and jegging flew flags for social media, television advertising, recession-era holidays and women's leggings respectively.
None of them broke through, but as a set they demonstrate the processes behind language change. Wordplay, blending, clipping, and the adoption of foreign terms are all represented. Dent made the point explicitly: the winner and the shortlist together showed the most successful mechanisms by which English renews itself.
What the awards actually measure
The Oxford Word of the Year is not a popularity contest and it is not a prediction. Selection combines corpus evidence, which tracks how frequently a term appears across a vast body of text, with editorial judgement about cultural significance. A word that spikes and vanishes is a candidate. A word that spikes and then settles into ordinary use is a winner.
The practice has since spread. Dictionary publishers, language institutes and newspapers in dozens of countries now run their own versions, and the German Wort des Jahres and the Japanese kanji of the year predate most of the English-language equivalents. Comparing them across a single year is one of the more instructive things a linguist can do, because the same event produces entirely different lexical residue depending on where you stand.
Why translators watch this closely
New coinages are where translation is hardest. A word that carries a specific political charge in one country has no ready equivalent anywhere else, and a translator handed "big society" has three bad options: render it literally and lose the connotation, explain it and destroy the rhythm, or borrow it and hope the reader can look it up.
This is the same problem that produces the endless fascination with untranslatable words, the terms like saudade, hygge or schadenfreude that migrate into English precisely because English has no compact way to say what they say. Borrowing is not a failure of the language. It is how English has always worked, and it accounts for a substantial share of the vocabulary that now looks native.
The mechanisms of coinage
Most new entries in the dictionary are produced by a handful of predictable processes:
- Blending, where two words are fused, as with jegging from jeans and legging
- Compounding, which produced staycation and most of the vocabulary of the last recession
- Conversion, in which a noun quietly becomes a verb and nobody objects until it is too late
- Clipping and abbreviation, the engine behind most internet vocabulary
- Borrowing, which brings in foreign terms wholesale and naturalises them within a generation
Understanding these patterns is what lets a lexicographer look at a candidate term and estimate whether it will still be in use in five years. Most will not be. Studying neologism examples across successive shortlists is a fast education in which coinages have staying power and which are simply attached to a news cycle.
From shortlist to dictionary entry
Winning a word of the year award does not put a term in the dictionary. The two processes are separate, and the second one is far more conservative. Lexicographers want evidence that a word has been used widely, over a sustained period, across independent sources, and in contexts where the writer assumed the reader would understand it without explanation. That last test is the strictest. A term still being glossed in parentheses has not arrived.
Corpus tools have made the evidence-gathering faster but not the decision easier. Editors still have to judge whether a spike represents genuine adoption or a single news event echoing through a thousand outlets that all copied the same wire story. Words that clear the bar tend to do so quietly, years after the moment that produced them, which is why the dictionary always looks slightly behind the culture and is, on balance, right to be.
The awkward afterlife of a winning word
There is one final irony to the choice of big society. The phrase won because it dominated the year's political conversation, and within a few years it had become a punchline, invoked mainly by people mocking the policy it described. Words of the year frequently age this way. They fix a moment so precisely that they cannot survive it.
That is not a flaw in the exercise. The point of tracking new words in english is not to identify what will last but to mark what mattered, and by that standard the 2010 choice was accurate. Language communities like r/languagelearning still cite these lists as a shortcut into the cultural preoccupations of a given year, which is exactly what a good word of the year is supposed to preserve.