While President Trump’s supporters were chanting “send her back!”during his rally in North Carolina Wednesday night, others were running to their dictionaries to try to get a handle on what they were witnessing.
Merriam-Webster tweeted out its top searches on its online dictionary for the night after the rally.
They were (in order): racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia and bigot.
The turbulent political landscape has given a number of words a higher profile the past few years. Dictionary.com crowned “misinformation”as its word of the year for 2018.
While the word has been around since the late 1500s, it made a huge comeback last year as the amount of false information on the internet expanded.
British publisher Oxford Dictionaries made “toxic” its word of the year last year. Oxford Dictionaries says that its research showed that in 2018 “more than ever, people have been using ‘toxic’ to describe a vast array of things, situations, concerns and events.”