The Oxford Word of the Year is … CLIMATE EMERGENCY.

‘Climate emergency’ is defined as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.’

https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2019

Usage of the phrase CLIMATE EMERGENCY increased steeply over the course of 2019, and by September it was more than 100 times as common as it had been the previous year.

This year, CLIMATE EMERGENCY has surpassed all other types of emergency, to become the most written about by a huge margin, with over three times the usage frequency of HEALTH, in second place.

This represents a new trend in the use of the word ‘emergency’.

In 2018, the top types of emergencies people wrote about were HEALTH, HOSPITAL, and FAMILY emergencies. These suggest acute situations of danger at a very personal level.

But in 2019, we see something new with CLIMATE EMERGENCY: an extension of emergency to the global level.

CRISIS and ACTION feature alongside ‘emergency’ as the words most typically used to modify ‘climate’ in 2019, as recorded in our corpus – exceeding pairings like SCIENTIST, VARIABILITY and PREDICTION, which have dominated the usage data for more than 10 years.

This data is significant because it indicates a growing shift in people’s language choice in 2019, a conscious intensification that challenges accepted language use to reframe discussion of ‘the defining issue of our time’ with a new gravity and greater immediacy.

Learn more about why ‘climate emergency’ is the 2019 Oxford Word of the Year, here: https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2019