Depending on who you ask, the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election rattled the country or were cause for celebration.

Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”.

Merriam-Webster has chosen “gaslighting” as its word of the year for 2022.

It's an omnipresent truth: Merriam-Webster has declared vaccine its 2021 word of the year.

In this Saturday, Nov. 21, 2020, photo taken through a camera lens the word "pandemic" in seen in a dictionary in Washington. Dictionary.com declared pandemic its 2020 word of the year. For the first time, two dictionary companies on Monday — Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com — declared the same word as their tops: pandemic. “Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. The word pandemic dates to the mid-1600s, used broadly for “universal” and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, he said.

NEW YORK – If you were to choose a word that rose above most in 2020, which word would it be? Ding, ding, ding: Merriam-Webster on Monday announced “pandemic” as its 2020 word of the year. “Often the big news story has a technical word that's associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. On March 11, when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, lookups on the site for pandemic spiked hugely. The word pandemic dates to the mid-1600s, used broadly for “universal” and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, he said.

Merriam-Webster is revising its definition of racism after a Missouri woman's emails claimed it fell short of including the systemic oppression of certain groups of people. "It's not just disliking someone because of their race," Mitchum wrote in a Facebook post. "This current fight we are in is evidence of that, lives are at stake because of the systems of oppression that go hand-in-hand with racism." "This second definition covers the sense that Ms. Mitchum was seeking, and we will make its wording even more clear in our next release," he said. (This story was originally published by CBS News on June 10 at 6:27 a.m. PT)RELATED CONTENT:Gayle King Talks Racism in America and Worrying About Her SonPorsha Williams Recalls Her First Experience with Racism at Age 6Rachel Lindsay Calls for 'Bachelor' to Acknowledge Systemic Racism