Cambridge Word Of The Year 2022 Is ‘Homer’, And It Has A Wordle Connection

Cambridge Dictionary has announced the word 'homer' as the 2022 Word Of The Year, and said that the decision was inspired by the word game sensation, Wordle.

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Cambridge Dictionary has declared the word, “homer”. as the 2022 Word Of The Year, and said that the decision was inspired by the word game sensation, Wordle. The editors cited the word as causing many Wordle enthusiasts to lose their streaks when the unfamiliar term was used. Wordle was created last year and went viral in January 2022. Later, it was acquired by the New York Times. It sees players across the world logging in every midnight to try their six attempts at guessing the five-letter word of the day.

Homer, an informal American-English word for a home run in baseball, became the Cambridge Dictionary’s highest-spiking word of the year as five-letter Wordle answers dominated searches this year. The majority of searches, approximately 95 percent for the word homer, came from outside of North America as players were finding it tough to understand the meaning of the word.

According to Cambridge, homer saw over 65,000 searches occurring in a single day on the dictionary website in 2022. Homer was the Wordle word of the day on May 5 this year, and this significant surge of searches occurred on that day. The dictionary website said the same word is used very differently in British and American English. 

In the Cambridge English Corpus, it said, homer as noun is "often used as the object of verbs such as hit, slug, belt, smack, or smash, which vividly convey the force needed to hit a baseball out of the field of play to score a home run". These patterns are usually found in American English sources.

When it comes to British English, 'homer' refers to the Ancient Greek poet, and the word spelt with a capital 'H' is "more typically the subject of verbs like translate, quote, and read". In the Cambridge Dictionary, Homer appears in an idiom, as it says "even Homer sometimes nods, which is used to say that even an expert sometimes makes mistakes".

Meanwhile, homer was not the only five-letter word that saw a search spike in 2022. Cambridge Dictionary saw many five-letter words surging in search in 2022 due to what it called the “Wordle effect”. On the list are humor (the US spelling for humour), 'caulk', 'tacit', and 'bayou', which were some of the toughest words that Wordle players encountered over the past one year.