I love words. I love to read and to gain knowledge, as well as to develop an understanding of other viewpoints and different life experiences. On the other side, I also love writing. It is a way to communicate my thoughts clearly and to think them through in advance. It is also a way to get those thoughts into order. From a simple list to a carefully written and important email or letter, it is a way to process my feelings by getting everything out on paper or the screen. The skill of writing has also been an essential part of my career in marketing, and I enjoy writing for this newspaper and various magazines. I also constantly remind myself of how words – whether spoken or written – can be very powerful and can strengthen, heal or break relationships, and sometimes even change the course of history.

A few years ago, I decided to pick a personal ‘word of the year’ to try to steer the months ahead in a thoughtful way rather than making a whole bunch of New Year’s resolutions. This past January I chose ‘balance’.

Well, in assessing my progress now that we are over a quarter of the way through 2025, I ‘really could do better’ as my math teacher used to say to me….I am still working too much, not exercising enough and my equilibrium is not as zen-like as I would wish.

Dictionary publishers also pick specific words every New Year when they announce a variety of new words into their dictionaries, which ultimately find their way into our daily vocabulary. New inclusions for this year were “Meta-verse” for virtual spaces and “Eco-minimalism” for sustainable living. Then at the end of each year, dictionary publishers choose a ‘word of the year’ based on data, tracking rises in search and usage.

Last December, the British Cambridge Dictionary chose its word for the year to be ‘manifest’ which means “to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.” The dictionary chose that word because users searched for it over 130,000 times. The Oxford English Dictionary organized a vote in which 37,000 people participated and stated that “brain rot” would be their word of the year, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

I think we all know that feeling!

On this side of the Atlantic last December, The American Merriam-Webster Dictionary chose ‘polarization’ meaning “causing strong disagreement between opposing factions or groupings.”

Dictionary.com, the world’s leading online dictionary, announced that “demure” was their word of the year. The word means “reserved, quiet, or modest,” and its popularity rose due to American lifestyle and beauty influencer Jools Lebron’s use of the phrase “very demure, very mindful” on TikTok.

All this led me to thinking about dictionaries and how they evolved.

I have always enjoyed learning new words and the origins of these words. Back when we were all younger, that meant referring to big, thick, printed dictionaries, whereas now of course we just turn to our cell phones and use search engines.

The earliest dictionaries, such as those created by the Greeks in the 1st century, emphasized changes that had occurred in the meanings of words over time. Then the close proximity of different languages in Europe led to the appearance, from the early Middle Ages onward, of many bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. The movement to produce an all-English dictionary was partly prompted by a desire for wider literacy, so that common people could read Scripture, and partly by a general frustration that no standardized spelling guidelines existed. The first purely English dictionary is believed to be Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604), standardizing some 3,000 words. In 1746–47 Samuel Johnson undertook the most ambitious English dictionary of that time, a list of 43,500 words. Over on this side of the Atlantic, Noah Webster published the first American unabridged dictionary in 1828. The G. & C. Merriam Co., founded in 1831, acquired the rights after the death of Noah Webster in 1843 to his An American Dictionary of the English Language, and Merriam-Webster continued to update their editions of this respected dictionary. Merriam-Webster dictionaries began to be published in electronic formats, including CDROMs and handheld devices, in the 1980s, and in 1996 Merriam-Webster introduced an online version.

There is a lot more information at www.britannia.com and www.history.com.

I say goodbye this week with a well-known quote from British novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton dating from 1839 in his historical play Cardinal Richelieu - “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I could not agree more.

God Bless America!

Lesley grew up in London, England and made Georgia her home in 2009.

She can be contacted at lesley@francis. com or via her full-service marketing agency at www.lesleyfrancispr.com