Donald Trump claims to have “the best words.” His words are so good, in fact, that voters need to flock to an online dictionary to find out what the heck they mean. Is Donald Trump making dictionaries great again? Maybe, if you’re counting clicks on their websites.
Roughly 80 million people watched Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton square off at the first presidential debate, and from the looks of the top dictionary searches at Merriam-Webster.com, following the event, many people came away from the experience wanting for further descriptions of some of the things that came out of Trump’s mouth. Or, at least what they thought was coming out of his mouth.
According to Merriam-Webster.com, lookups for ‘braggadocio’ spiked 15,500% during the debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, after Trump used a word that is very similar in nature and spelling. Trump, in actuality, used the word ‘braggadocious’ at one point during the debate, which is a dialectical word from 19th century America, meaning “arrogant.”
Another hot search centered around Trump’s common use of the phrase “big league.” Many apparently heard “bigly”, causing lookups for ‘big’ and ‘bigly’ to spike on September 26th and 27th. The word”big” also saw an enormous 65,000% spike on the site. Leave it to Donald Trump to make people need to Google the word ‘big’. It’s a confusing time for us all.
The term ‘stamina’ spiked by 8,800% following Donald Trump’s repeated claims that it was something Hillary Clinton lacked, while the word ‘temperament’ saw a 77,000% jump in lookups following the record-setting debate.
It will be interesting to see what buzz words are most searched for then the candidates square off again on October 9th. Until then, we’ll be over here trying to use ‘braggadocious’ in as many sentences as possible.
(Via Merriam-Webster)
