Coming up on Word Matters, trending words.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We at Merriam-Webster know what you're thinking.
Well, sort of.
We know how many people are looking up a particular word at a particular time,
and from there we can infer what has captured the curiosity of the dictionary-going public.
Here are Amon Shea and Peter Sakalowski on one of our most enduring features on Merriam-Webster.com.
Trend Watch.
One of the most popular features of the online dictionary that we have at Miriam Webster is what we refer to as the trend watch section of our site,
which is where we do short articles on words that are trending in the news and consequently trending lookups in our dictionary.
It's not the... the newest aspect of our site.
We've been doing it for what?
About 10 years.
About 10 years now, right?
It seems logical an online dictionary would report on the data or report on the lookups.
But in fact, when it started, we were kind of new to this and it was all innocent.
If we go back before the website trend watch articles,