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WORDS · LANGUAGE · ETYMOLOGY
WORD OF THE YEAR 2024:
COSMODELYTE 51%
(n.) someone fearful of the state of the world
Perhaps one year we’ll have an optimistic winner, but this year ain’t it.
Every year since 2016 on Haggard Hawks, we’ve shortlisted five suitably unusual and obscure words that sum up the previous twelve months, and then opened the polls to you to select which one is crowned Word of the Year. And, taking just over half of the votes in this year’s poll, the 2024 HH Word of the Year is cosmodelyte—a word for someone fearful of the world.
This might feel like the most 2020s of coinages, but cosmodelyte takes us back to 1656, when the English lexicographer Thomas Blount first included this in his dictionary of “hard words”, Glossographia. Blount pointed out too that this (regrettably very useful) word combines a pair of classical Greek roots: one meaning the world, the other sorrowful or wretched. Put those together, and you have an appropriately nervy word for someone unsure of the world around them, and what its future might hold.
Alas never much found outside of dictionaries and glossaries such as Blount’s (whose definition is the sole record of cosmodelyte in the Oxford English Dictionary), perhaps the state of the world in the mid 2020s will be enough to haul this intriguing term out of obscurity.
THE SHORTLIST
opiniastrous 22%
(adj.) excessively opinionated, stubbornly holding onto or attached to one’s own point of view
pretermit 10%
(v.) to omit or overlook, to turn a blind eye to
ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff 9%
(adj.) descriptive of a measure or solution that fails to address the causes of a problem, typically while ignoring a more straightforward or sensible response
dummify 8%
(v.) to become or to make someone less intelligent
Elsewhere, the 2024 shortlist comprised a handful of words relating to the deepening social and political divisions of time, plus the global response (or lack thereof) to situations such as those in the Middle East and Ukraine. In a 2024 in which it seemed ever more people were failing to question the information peddled to them online, moreover, the verb dummify—meaning to make or become less intelligent—came in a respectable fifth.