Climate advocates and experts celebrated Oxford Dictionaries’ announcement Wednesday that “climate emergency” is the Oxford Word of the Year 2019.
Oxford defines climate emergency as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.”
The term beat out other climate-related language on Oxford’s shortlist, including climate action, climate crisis, climate denial, eco-anxiety, ecocide, extinction, flight shame, global heating, net-zero, and plant-based.
“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,” Katherine Connor Martin, an editor at Oxford Dictionaries, told The New York Times about the decision. “It reflects it was a real preoccupation of the English-speaking world in 2019.”
Usage of climate emergency has “increased steeply” throughout the year, and “by September it was more than 100 times as common as it had been the previous year,” according to Oxford’s data.
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Oxford’s official annoucement, published online, offers futher details about the explosive use of the term by scientists, journalists, and the public:
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