NFTs have had quite a year. They’ve rejuvenated the art industry by billions. Some have garnered $69 million. And entire NFT museums have sprung to the scene. They’ve also come under immense scrutiny for their environmental impact. To add to this staggering rise, Collins Dictionary has just named NFT as its word of the year.
As you might have already noticed, this selection is an interesting one because it’s not really a word at all. NFT is the abbreviation of “non-fungible token,” and Collins defines it as “a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible.” Here’s our own explainer if you want more than that.
For the dictionary’s 2021 list, technology terms dominated, with three words in total that belong to this realm. The other two that followed “NFT” are “metaverse” and “crypto“, which for 2021 are quite on the nose.
Other Gen-Z esque words composed the list, including “cheugy” the slang word to deem something as “uncool” or no longer in style. “Climate anxiety,” used to define distress caused by climate change, and “Regencycore,” a style of dressing derived from the Bridgerton-era, also made the list.
The words aren’t typically what you’d expect from a dictionary, but are definitely emblematic of our everyday language, especially this year. In fact, most of Collins’ selection are circa 2021.
An apt example is “pingdemic,” or the large-scale notifications of members of the public by a contract-tracing app. The term is rife in the UK especially, where the National Health Service’s COVID-19 app is known to frequently inform users whether they need to self-isolate.
The winning words were selected from the Collins Corpus, an analytical database with over 4.5 billion words. NFTs: you can’t avoid them.
