The Cambridge Dictionary
Word of the Year 2022 is…
homer
noun [ C ] US informal
UK
US
short for home run: a point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base
This informal American English term for a home run in baseball left players of Wordle who were not familiar with the word feeling confused and frustrated. Tens of thousands of these Wordle players took to the Cambridge Dictionary to understand the meaning of the word homer.
The word homer saw a huge spike in searches on the Cambridge Dictionary website in 2022, with over 65,000 searches occurring in a single day.
Why homer?
What does it say about 2022?
The differences between British and American English are always of interest, not just to learners of English but to English speakers globally, and word games have always been a popular combination of education and entertainment. We’ve seen those two areas come together in the public conversations about Wordle, and the way five-letter words have taken over the search data on the Cambridge Dictionary website this year.
“Perhaps it’s no wonder that people enjoy the focus and mental challenge of a simple word game that can be a shared experience with family and friends, whether they’re physically together or not, at a time of volatility and prolonged recovery from a global pandemic. Even the complaints about the choice of words seem to be part of the fun.”
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary
Take a deeper look at homer as a word
Find out more
To see how the word homer is being used, we looked at a multi-billion-word collection of written and spoken language. Our team analyzed language data from recent sports broadcasts, news articles, blog entries, social media posts, conversations, and website content from around the world, exploring what speakers and writers mean by homer, and in what contexts this word is typically used.
Expand your vocabulary and test yourself with our Top five-letter words word list, specially created by the Cambridge Dictionary team. You can find this word list and many more by signing up for free to Cambridge Dictionary +Plus.
Our Word of the Year word list
Learn more
Our blog, About Words, is written by language usage experts to help learners gain confidence in using vocabulary related to specific topics. Read our Word of the Year blog post and share your thoughts in the comments.
Learn about words on our blog
Read more
Check out these past winners of the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year.
Previous Word of the Year winners
This significant surge of searches occurred on May 5, when homer was the winning word on the popular online word game Wordle.
Homer was not the only five-letter word that saw a spike in searches in 2022. Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s most popular online dictionary by page views, saw bursts of searches for many five-letter words in 2022 as the “Wordle effect” took hold. Among the long list of these five-letter words are humor (the American spelling of humour), and words like caulk, tacit, and bayou, which prove that short words aren’t always easy ones!
Spikes for American words and spellings such as homer, humor, and favor happened because of a series of social media storms led by angry players of the popular word game Wordle, especially those who don’t speak American English. It wasn’t all one way, however: a lesser spike, but still noticeable, occurred when the British word bloke was a Wordle answer in February, prompting some annoyance in the US.
The five Wordle words with the highest spikes in 2022
American and British English have differences in spellings, like center/centre or color/colour, and in vocabulary, like elevator/lift or candy/sweets. There are even some grammar differences!
Professor Lynne Murphy, author of Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English, tells us why British English speakers sometimes complain about these differences.
British vs. American English
Has our Word of the Year made you curious about the differences between British and American English? Let’s learn how to explore these differences using the Cambridge Dictionary.
Did you know that the Cambridge Dictionary website automatically recognizes which country you are in so it can show you the most useful results? If you are in the UK, it will show you British English words and spellings in definitions and example sentences, whereas if you’re in the US, it will show you American English ones.
Whichever language you choose, you can always find results for both British and American English words and spellings if you search for them in our English dictionary.
How to choose your preferred language on the Cambridge Dictionary:
British and American English in the Cambridge Dictionary
Click to
see more
2016 paranoid
Homer is used very differently in British and American English, hinting at the difficulties faced by Wordle players.
Take a deeper look at homer as a word
What did we find?
Back to previous page
Even for expert speakers of English, the way in which language is used isn’t always an easy thing to describe or explain. Language is changeable and varies from person to person. Often, word
patterns and associations aren’t things we can easily pick out or describe just by reading newspaper articles or by scrolling through our social media feeds. So, to find out more about how words behave, we look at huge, structured collections of them in our Corpus.
How do we investigate a word?
We can see similar tendencies when we look for words that typically appear in the same context as homer. In the Cambridge English Corpus as a whole, homer behaves in a similar way to nouns like RBI, inning, and strikeout – all baseball terms – as well as terms from other sports, such as touchdown (an act of scoring points in American football). Once again, however, these patterns only appear in American English texts. Likewise, the verb to homer, meaning to score a home run, is found almost exclusively in American English.
One reason why homer is so much more common in American English is that the game of baseball, which is very popular in the US, is rarely played in Britain. However, this does not tell the whole story, and just because a word refers to something from the US does not necessarily mean that it is an American English word.
We can see this by looking at the example of home run. Although it means the same thing as homer, the full form home run is more likely to be found in British English texts. Even though it is still not as common in British English as in American English, unlike homer, it is not a distinctively American English term.
In the Cambridge English Corpus, the noun homer is often used as the object of verbs such as hit, slug, belt, smack, or smash, which vividly convey the force needed to hit a baseball out of the field of play to score a home run. However, these patterns are mostly found in American English sources. In British English texts, hit a homer is occasionally found in newspapers reporting on international baseball games, but homer is more typically the subject of verbs like translate, quote, and read. In these cases, of course, the noun is spelled with a capital letter, as it refers not to baseball scores, but to Homer, the Ancient Greek poet. His name is unconnected to baseball, but this Homer appears in the Cambridge Dictionary in an idiom, even Homer sometimes nods, which is used to say that even an expert sometimes makes mistakes.
One characteristic that is shared by homer and home run is their ability to be used metaphorically. To hit a homer, or to hit a home run, can be used to talk about succeeding in an activity in a complete and impressive way.
These are only two of many examples of baseball words that can be used figuratively in American English. For example, you might swing for the fences, throw somebody a curveball, or hit the ball out of the park. However, the US isn’t the only country that has adopted terms from sports to talk about everyday life; in the UK, cricket has given the English language phrases like knock someone for six, and it is thanks to football (or soccer in American English) that we can describe a mistake that puts you at an unintended disadvantage as an own goal.
Our team’s research showed why North American Wordle players were delighted on May 5, while many British players were left confused.
In parts of Britain, however, some people might have had a different reason for recognizing homer; in Scotland, it is used to mean a job that a skilled worker does for a private customer in the customer’s home. Despite this, many British English speakers were probably most familiar with the word homer not because of Scottish tradesmen or baseball, but because of a different American import.
The most common homer in the Cambridge English Corpus is, in fact, Homer Simpson !
We collect data from...
