NEW YORK — Merriam-Webster announced on Monday its 2024 word of the year is "polarization", which it said "happens to be one idea that both sides of the political spectrum agree on".

"We define polarization as 'division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes,'" Merriam-Webster, a US company publishing reference books and mostly known for its dictionaries, said in a release.

The word was widely used across the US media landscape in 2024. Fox News reported that "Vance's debate answer on the immigration crisis shows voter polarization", while MSNBC observed that "the 2024 presidential election has left our country more polarized than ever".

According to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, about eight in 10 Kamala Harris voters were very or somewhat concerned that Donald Trump's views were too extreme, while about seven in 10 Trump voters felt the same way about Harris.

"Polarization means division, but it's a very specific kind of division," Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, told The Associated Press ahead of Monday's announcement. "Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center."

Last year's pick was "authentic". This year's comes as large swaths of the US struggle to reach consensus on what is real.

"It's always been important to me that the dictionary serves as a kind of neutral and objective arbiter of meaning for everybody," Sokolowski said.

The word was also used to describe divides beyond the US election, as when Forbes warned that in workplaces, "cultural polarization is becoming a pressing challenge", according to the release of Merriam-Webster.

Other words that stood out in the company's lookup data in 2024 are: totality, demure, fortnight, pander, resonate, allision, weird, cognitive and democracy.

Agencies - Xinhua