It’s an end-of-year tradition: Dictionaries put out press releases and blog posts with their words of the year. But how do they pick them? Edgar B. Herwick III from GBH's Curiosity Desk joined Morning Edition’s Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel to discuss. This transcript has been lightly edited.

Paris Alston: This happens every year. You help us dissect and understand why the words of the year made it to the list. So tell us, what are they? Why are they there?

Edgar B. Herwick, III: Well, words of the year have been something that's been done by various publications for decades now, started, by some accounts, back in the 1970s by Germans, and we'll get to Germany a little later. But here in the U.S., it's been going on since about the '90s, and more and more dictionaries and publications have gotten on the train over the years. And so now we're going to look at a few here in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. who have named a word of the year and why they've done what they've done.

Jeremy Siegel: So the big one here in the U.S. is Merriam-Webster.

Herwick: Our local dictionary, out of Springfield.

Siegel: Their 2022 word of the year is gaslighting, which we talk a little bit about. Are you a fan of the word "gaslighting"? I actually talked about how I kind of hate the word. I think it's overused.

Herwick: The thing that's interesting in my conversation with Peter Sokolowski, who is the editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster — he talked about how in fact, they changed their definition of gaslighting in 2016. "Gaslighting," of course, comes from this film, "Gaslight" from the 1940s. And for the first few decades of its existence as a word, it really meant a one-on-one interaction where one person was trying to make one other person essentially feel like they were crazy. But then there was this famous article that I think was in Teen Vogue in 2016, that had the headline Donald Trump is Gaslighting America. And all of a sudden, this sense of gaslighting as something that was no longer one-on-one, but could be something that was done by one person to many at once.

And of course, one of the interesting things when we look at these words of the year across many dictionaries, everybody kind of does it a little bit differently. And at Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski was saying they're very data driven, which is to say they're basically just looking at the data and saying what is the word, when we control for a whole bunch of other things, what's the word that is most looked up all year long? And for them, it was "gaslighting" and that actually surprised him.

[Previously recorded]

Peter Sokolowski: This is one of those words that rose to our top 20, top 30 lookups every single day of the year. And that was enough kind of raw tonnage. Without a single story that gave it a spike, it still had enough lookups during 2022 to put it head and shoulders above any other word. And what's interesting is it shows that the public is really interested in this idea of instability of information.

[Recording ends]

Siegel: I feel vindicated here.

Herwick: Yeah, I was going to say: To use your use your way of saying it, Jeremy, it's being overused right now.

Alston: So you talk about how different dictionaries do theirs differently. What about Dictionary.com? I know theirs just came out recently.

Herwick: They also look at data. Data informs their choice for the word of the year. They're looking at lookups over the course of the year, but then they mix that with kind of an editorial side where they look over news stories, they look at what's in the zeitgeist, so to speak, and combine that with their data to select their word of the year. Their word of the year for this year is the word "woman."

Alston: Let me be your woman. Kind of like that.

Herwick: That's right. I spoke with John Kelly, who's the senior editorial director at Dictionary.com. Here he is talking about that word.

[Previously recorded]

John Kelly: The word "woman," how it is defined, who is included in that definition, and who the word applies to, was at the center of so many consequential moments, discussions and decisions in our society in 2022.

[Recording ends]

Siegel: I like imagining you and John Kelly, just two dudes talking about the word "woman."

Herwick: There's probably 20 minutes of tape of that.

Alston: That's a pertinent point, because something has come to mind for me here, Edgar, is that these words of the year are always very simple, but they're profound. And in this year, the word 'woman' has been extremely profound. Not only when we think about the things that happen to women, but the definitions of woman, all those sorts of things.

Herwick: And that's exactly why they chose it. So they and John Kelly was saying they saw a 1,400% spike in lookups for the word "woman" in March during the confirmation hearings — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, because she was point blank asked for her definition of the word "woman."

Siegel: Let's talk a little bit about the words of the year abroad. I guess we can start with England since we're here in New England. Let's go back to Old England. What were some of their words?

Herwick: Nice segue, Jeremy. So we have two big dictionaries there. We have the Oxford English Dictionary — their word of the year was done a little differently this year. They had typically selected it themselves. This year they made a shortlist of three words and then gave it to the public to vote. So their three finalists were "metaverse," '#IStandWith" and "goblin mode." Were you like, what the heck is "goblin mode"? Okay. So I also felt the same way. So let's at least lay this out. "Goblin mode" means a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.

Alston: Yeah, we likened it to "Goon to a Goblin" by Lil Wayne. I don't know if you heard us talking about it.

Herwick: So the funny thing here is my impulse was I've never heard this word. Maybe they're using it in England. So I have a few friends in the U.K. This is obviously not scientific, but I reached out to them and I was like, have you ever heard or use this term "goblin mode"? To a person, they were like, absolutely not. I was like, well, maybe it's something that younger people are using. Well, one of my friends is a teacher in a middle school and he said his students don't use it. Then I found an article which was written in The Guardian. And speaking of vindication, this article was written by a woman named Rachel Connolly. She describes herself as a 29-year-old woman. And the headline was "Have some dignity, Oxford English Dictionary. No one says goblin mode." So it wasn't just me. It seems like there is at least some people in the U.K., despite the fact that, to be fair, it received 93% of the vote. Now there were only 340,000 votes cast, but it did win 93% of the vote. But there's at least some people in England who also say nobody's using this word and that maybe it's a little bit of an overreach and the dictionary's trying to kind of strike a chord with the youth or go viral or whatever it is, and just missed the boat.

Alston: All right. So let's move to another English-speaking nation, Australia, where I understand the word of the year is maybe one that you wouldn't suspect.

Herwick: So the word of the year, and I'd love your reaction to this, is "teal."

Siegel: Huh? That's my reaction: huh. The color?

Herwick: As in teal, the color.

Alston: Pretty, ok.

Herwick: Well, there's a reason for this. And the reason for this is that "teal" there has become a symbol of an independent political movement. So the "teal" is a is a hybrid of kind of the more aggressive green movement and the blue Liberal Party. And so it's sort of like, in America we might think of purple states.

Siegel: So Edgar, one, we promised people we would get to Germany. And two, I know there's also a word of the year in Japan. Can you give a quick roundup of what else across the world were the words of the year?

Herwick: So right in Japan, we had Murakami-sama, which is a nickname for a baseball player, there, a very famous one, named Murakami Munetaka. The interesting thing in Japan is they made a short list of 30 words. Six of those words were baseball-related. So while we look at America, where baseball is kind of waning in popularity, in Japan, it's still very clearly has a lot of social cachet. And then we have Germany, where they do a youth-slash-slang word of the year and their word was "smash," which is strange, right? It's an English word. So this comes from this concept, "smash or pass" that they have, which is kind of like a do you like him or her or do you not like him or her? Do you like them or not? Would you swipe left or would you swipe right, smash or pass? So that's their word of the year.

Alston: This is very much antithesis to woman being the word of the year.

Herwick: Yeah, it's interesting. Although I talked to I talked to Nikolas Hönig with Langenscheidt, and that's the publication that does this. And I was like, is this like an explicit word? And he said, No, it doesn't really have that explicit feel. It's a little bit more gentle than that.