School, college and other closings for Monday

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

If what we search for is any indication of what we value, then things aren’t looking great for artificial intelligence. 

2023 word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary

, landing among the most-looked-up words in the dictionary’s 500,000 entries, the company said in a press release Monday. 

After all, this was the year that Chat GPT 

 got a taste of comeuppance after years of lying. The 

 was about a world of pristine plastic colliding with flesh-and-blood reality.

 told brands to be more “authentic” on Twitter (now X) before deciding to 

2023 was the year that authenticity morphed into performance, its very meaning made fuzzy amidst the onslaught of algorithms and alternative facts. The more we crave it, the more we question it. 

This is where the dictionary definition comes in. 

“Although clearly a desirable quality, 

is hard to define and subject to debate — two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary,” Merriam-Webster said in its release. Look-ups for the word saw a “substantial increase in 2023,” it added.

For a word that we might associate with a certain kind of reliability, “authentic” comes with more than one meaning. 

It’s a synonym for “real,” defined as “not false or imitation.” But it can also mean “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character” and, sneakily, “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

This may be why we connect it to ethnicity

(authentic cuisine or authentic accent) but also identity in the larger sense (authentic voice and authentic self). In this age where artifice seems to advance daily, we’re in a collective moment of trying to go back, to connect with some earlier, simpler version of ourselves.

The dictionary said an additional 13 words stood out in 2023’s look-up data. Not surprisingly, quite a few of them have a direct tie-in to the year’s biggest news stories: 

Others on the list feel connotatively connected to “authentic,” or at least our perception of identity in a changing age — words like 

This year, the data-crunchers had to filter out countless five-letter words because they appeared on the smash-hit 

, the dictionary’s editor-at-large told 

That people were turning to Merriam-Webster to verify new vocabulary could be read as a sign of progress. After all, 2022’s word of the year belied a distrust of authority: 

Arts and Culture

Homepage

Emily Olson

Author

“Authentic” was one of this year’s most looked-up words, according to the lexical leader. That speaks volumes about our quest for truth in an age of algorithms and online artifice.

Merriam-Webster's word of the year definitely wasn't picked by AI

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox