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It's official — the 2016 Word of the Year is 'dumpster fire'
Mark Abadi
dumpster fire
dumpster fire

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It's a fitting end to one of the most chaotic years in recent memory.

"Dumpster fire" has been declared 2016's Word of the Year.

One word simply wasn't enough for the American Dialect Society, a group of linguists, lexicographers, and grammarians that voted on the award on Friday at its annual convention, held in Austin, Texas, this year.

The society's flagship event, once called "the Super Bowl of linguistics," aims to crown the word or phrase that defined the year and saw widespread or innovative usage.

Loosely defined as a poorly-handled or out-of-control situation, "dumpster fire" could apply to any number of consequential events that took place in 2016 — from a bitterly contested election that upended US politics as we know it, and a cataclysmic Brexit vote that sent shockwaves through Europe, to a series of tragic shootings and terrorist attacks and a seemingly endless list of high-profile celebrity deaths.

"As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one,” Ben Zimmer, chairman of the society's new words committee, said in a statement. "In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events."

The metaphor first gained prominence among sports-radio hosts, Zimmer said, and eventually seeped its way into the mainstream by the time the presidential election was in full swing. The term was often depicted pictorially on Twitter with two emojis, a trashcan and a flame.

"Dumpster fire" edged out "woke" — an adjective suggesting a high level of social consciousness — in a run-off vote for the title. Coming in third was another word employed by the political left: "Normalize," meaning "to render normal that which was previously deemed beyond acceptable bounds."

And, yes, the linguists are aware that "dumpster fire" is in fact two words. But as Zimmer noted, anything considered a lexical item can win the title, meaning multi-word terms, hashtags and even emojis are all fair game.

In the category of "Political Word of the Year," top honors went to "post-truth" — defined as "belonging to a time in which facts matter less than beliefs or emotions."

Other nominees in the category included "deplorables" (the infamous moniker Hillary Clinton gave to some Donald Trump supporters), "nasty woman" (what Trump called Clinton during the third presidential debate), "Pantsuit Nation" (the popular Facebook group and hashtag used by Clinton supporters), and "unpresidented" (the erroneous spelling of "unprecedented" Trump used in a post-election tweet).

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