'Post-truth' is Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year

Merica, moobs, scrumdiddlyumptious, and biatch are among the many words that were included in the Oxford English Dictionaries this year. People from southern India (and Sri Lanka) were amused when 'aiyyo', an everyday slang roughly meaning 'oh dear' made it to the world-renowned list, albeit with a different spelling.

Fact: The Oxford English Dictionaries has been the foremost authority on the English language, all over the world. OED is more than 150 years old and contains at least 6,00,000 entries. It is updated four times - March, June, September, and December - in a year, with the world keenly following the usually quirky entrants..

Now, every year the organisation chooses its international word of the year. Last year it was the 'tearful laughing face' emoji, while this year, the chosen word is 'post-truth' - an important indication of the sign of the times.

The president of Oxford Dictionaries Casper Grathwohl says that "post-truth" is the most relevant it's ever been in 2016, "fueled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment." Grathwohl's statement referenced the Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump as factors in this decision, doing that it could be "one of the defining words of our time."

Fake news stories online-especially on social media, have been at the centre of the post-US election rhetoric. Recently the BBC website even carried out a fake new quiz, asking readers whether they could make out fact from fiction .

The OED Word of The Year shortlist included words like 'Adulting' and 'Chatbot' - The former defined as ' the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks', and the latter as ' A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet'.

Source : http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37995600