Defining Moments: In politics, culture, sports and more, these words spiked in lookups because of events in the news.

	January 3: "Caucus" As the 2012 presidential election contest officially began…
	January 10: "Ambivalence" As Republicans reacted to Mitt Romney's victories…
	January 13: "Reductive" After Madonna used it to describe a Lady Gaga song…
	January 19: "Egregious" When Paula Deen announced that she has Type 2 diabetes…
	February 1: "Irregardless" A much-forwarded list of "Top 10 Grammar Peeves"…
	February 8: "Disposition" After a college basketball coach used the word to praise a rival…
	February 13: "Highfalutin" When a high school cheerleading coach berated her squad…
	February 20: "Reconcile" In two different celebrity relationship stories…
	February 29: "Moratorium" After North Korea agreed to suspend its nuclear…
	March 2: "Misogyny" In reaction to Rush Limbaugh's comments about…
	March 14: "Cri de Coeur" When a Goldman Sachs executive quit his job, he published…
	March 21: "Narcissism" After a study reported that people with many Facebook friends…
	March 23: "Dystopia" When "The Hunger Games" opened, many reviews described its…
	April 5: "Prima Donna" As the NFL scandal continued to unfold, a recording emerged…
	April 10: "Hubris" On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's departure…
	April 18: "Gaudy" When an $87 million mansion was put up for auction…
	April 20: "Disingenuous" During the trial of the man accused of murdering…
	May 1: "Anarchist" The five men arrested for plotting to blow up a bridge…
	May 7: "Touché" When Disney revealed details about a new technology…
	May 8: "Vincit Omnia Veritas" After the phrase appeared on a gravestone in a TV show…
	May 22: "Gibberish" An advisor to Mitt Romney dismissed an Obama campaign ad…
	May 27: "Bloviate" After commentator George Will said that Donald Trump was…
	June 1: "Guetapens" When it was spelled correctly to win the National Spelling Bee…
	June 12: "Gaffe" After President Obama remarked that the private sector was…
	June 21: "Genre" When it was used to describe a new vampire movie…
	June 27: "Roman à Clef" Obituaries of Nora Ephron referred to her novel "Heartburn"…
	July 4: "Boson" When evidence of the so-called "God particle," the Higgs boson…
	July 11: "Servitude" After a family in Britain was convicted of forcing…
	July 20: "Terrorism" The word's meaning was discussed after the tragic shooting…
	July 24: "Aviatrix" On the anniversary of Amelia Earhart's birthday…
	August 1: "Acerbic" With the passing of celebrated author Gore Vidal…
	August 8: "Decathlon" As this event began at the London Olympics…
	August 11: "Wonk" When Paul Ryan became the vice presidential candidate…
	August 17: "Hooliganism" When a Russian court sentenced the punk band Pussy Riot to…
	August 27: "Vituperative" Mitt Romney accused President Obama of running a…
	September 3: "Rhetoric" During the Republican and Democratic conventions…
	September 10: "Culture" Students arriving at college were greeted, as usual, with…
	September 18: "Surreptitious" The word was widely used to describe the video of…
	September 25: "Egregious" After NFL fans couldn't believe that a play was ruled a touchdown…
	October 4: "Pundit" After the first presidential debate, there was much reporting about…
	October 11: "Malarkey" When it was used several times during the vice-presidential debate…
	October 17: "Meme" After a phrase from the presidential debate went viral…
	October 22: "Tumult" When Mitt Romney used it during the final presidential debate…
	October 29: "Hunker" As Hurricane Sandy approached the east coast…
	November 6: "Socialism" Interest in the word reached its peak on Tuesday…
	November 14: "Inviolable" After it was used by a figure in the scandal surrounding…
	November 19: "Irony" After a widely read essay offered ways to "live without irony"…
	November 29: "Visceral" A new medical study revealed that deep belly fat in men…
	December 6: "Urbane" A national vocab test showed that most eighth graders don't know…
	December 11: "Poinsettia" A symbol of the Christmas season, and a challenge to spell…
	December 18: "Assault Rifle" The national conversation included many references to the…
	December 27: "Qi" Perhaps because of holiday use of Scrabble and other…

11 Weirdly Spelled Words – And How They Got That
Way

Mental Floss,  November 13, 2012

Lets’s Double Down On A Superstorm of Malarkey:

Picking 2012’s Word of the Year (audio clip)
National Public Radio, December 28, 2012

And 2012’s word of the year is…”Hashtag”

by Ben Zimmer,  The Boston Globe,  
December 16, 2012

(Ben Zimmer is Chairperson of the New Words Committee of the American Dialectic
Society)

Spoiler
Alert! List of Reviled Words Tries to Fight ‘Fiscal Cliff’
The New York Times, January 6, 2013