Cambridge Dictionary announced ‘Homer’ as Word of the Year 2022

Cambridge Dictionary: With 2022 coming to an end, the Cambridge Dictionary team has announced their Word of the Year for 2022. And it is ‘homer’, which is described as “short for home run : a point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base,” as per Cambridge Dictionary. The word ”homer” was searched for nearly 75,000 times during the first week of May 2022, when it was an answer in the word game Wordle. In the context of the game, ”homer” doesn’t refer to the Greek poet and author, or a character from Simpson, but refers to an informal American English word for a ‘home run’ in baseball.

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According to Cambridge, homer saw over 65,000 searches occurring in a single day on the dictionary website in 2022. Homer was the Wordle word of the day on May 5 this year, and this significant surge of searches occurred on that day. The dictionary website said the same word is used very differently in British and American English.

The “Wordle effect” was also evident in 2022 according to Cambridge Dictionary, where other five-letter words showed a rise in search. The second-highest spike in 2022 was produced by the American spelling of “funny,” which was followed by the third-, fourth-, and fifth-placed spellings of “caulk,” “tacit,” and “bayou.” Cambridge said that the decision to choose this word was influenced by the famous game ‘Wordle’.

About the Wordle game:

Wordle is a free online game that gives users a new word puzzle each day. It gives players six chances to guess a randomly selected five-letter word. The brainchild behind the game is Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle who created Wordle for free in October 2021 as a unique gift for his girlfriend Palak Shah. It was later acquired by The New York Times.