Every year, Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster identify a “word of the year,” arrived at in different ways. This year’s winners are “rizz” (slang for charisma) and “authenticity,” respectively.

Oxford University Press describes the word of the year:

The Oxford Word of the Year is a word or expression reflecting the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past twelve months, one that has potential as a term of lasting cultural significance.

Oxford University Press’s process is more extensive than Merriam-Webster’s. The Word of the Year website, which updated a couple of days after the word was announced, asked the public to “Help us choose the four finalists, before the final word for Oxford Word of the Year 2023 is revealed by our language experts.” About 30,000 people voted on word pairings, for example, “Swiftie” vs. “de-influencing,” and “rizz” vs. “beige flag.”

On an FAQ page, the organization answers the question, “How is the word chosen?”:

The candidates for the Word of the Year are drawn from evidence gathered by our extensive language research program, including the Oxford Corpus, which gathers around 150 million words of current English from web-based publications each month. Sophisticated software allows our expert lexicographers to identify new and emerging words and examine the shifts in how more established words are being used.

Dictionary editors also flag notable words for consideration throughout the year and use other sources of data to identify contenders.

We regularly take into account the many suggestions sent to us via social media.

The final Word of the Year selection is made by the Oxford Languages team on the basis of all the information available to us.

How Merriam-Webster chooses the word of the year is more data-driven and relies only on the dictionary’s searches, which we might expect given the source:

A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.

After digging for more information about the selection process, I found a 2018 video titled, “Behind the Scenes.” An editor-at-large provides a little more detail: “Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is determined by our online dictionary lookup data. The word must show both high volume of traffic and show year-over-year increase in lookups at Merriam-Webster.com.”

With its multiple, nebulous meanings, authentic, or authenticity, would inspire questions. The increase in searches particularly makes sense given one of the runners-up, deepfake. But the selection process could be more “worthy of acceptance,” one of the dictionary’s definitions of authentic.