Content We Love: Merriam-Webster’s 2015 Word of the Year

By the time the holiday season rolls around, brands are already deep into creating their end-of-year content. Holiday content begins making the rounds in early November. Then the moment the calendar turns to December, the year-end stories start.

Eye-catching end-of-year content should be easy for your audience to relate to. People like to reflect on what worked and what might work in the year to come — a look ahead in hopes of getting ahead.

Some of the year-end content filling our inboxes, favorite blogs and news outlets include:

• Top 10 Lists
• Best of (insert hot topic here) Lists
• Reflections on What We’re Thankful For
• Resolutions for the New Year
• Observations About the Past Year
• Predictions of Upcoming Trends
• Content Roundups

Brands are looking back, forward, any direction really, hoping to create a compelling story.

In this installment of Content We Love – our final for the year – Merriam-Webster looks inward with their announcement of 2015’s Words of the Year.

America’s leading dictionary publisher recently used user analytics to elucidate which words had a high volume and significant year-over-year increase of look-ups at Merriam-Webster.com.

However, it’s more than a basic ‘top ten’ list. Merriam-Webster’s list stands out because it’s a data-rich human interest piece cultivated from the search habits of everyday people.

The results shed light on topics and ideas that sparked the nation’s interest in 2015.

What’s even more interesting is that data can surprise you!

For the first time, Merriam-Webster has named a suffix, -ism, as its Word of the Year, reflecting the fact that many of Merriam-Webster’s highest ranking words this year had one thing in common — they ended in -ism:

• socialism
• fascism
• terrorism
• racism
• feminism
• communism
• capitalism

“These words reveal our curiosity and our engagement; we’re looking at the news through the prism of vocabulary,” added Peter Sokolowski, Editor-at-Large at Merriam-Webster. “A definition can be the beginning of reflection. This year, we’ve certainly had a lot on our minds.”

Not only has Merriam-Webster’s research revealed the top word(s) of the year, they uncovered the underlying emotions of an entire nation. By highlighting the power of data-driven storytelling, they put an excellent spin on what it means to write year-end content.

As Merriam-Webster’s announcement and our other installments of Content We Love demonstrated this year, the press release has evolved into a way to not just share company news, but also showcase industry research, contribute to brands’ demand generation strategies, and achieve many other objectives.

Download Reach Your Communications Objectives with an Intelligent Mix of Tactics to read more use cases of content we love and learn how to leverage press releases more effectively in 2016.

Author Ryan Hansen (@RPH2004) manages social media at PR Newswire, sharing the latest PR, marketing and social media trends across our networks. See what he’s up to around the PR Newswire offices by following @PRNewswire on Instagram.