Jools Lebron, photographed in New York in September, inspired Dictionary.com’s word of the year 2024 … [+]
A very careful Dictionary.com named its word of the year for 2024 this week: “demure,” which has grown in popularity and taken on new levels of meaning after TikTok influencer Jools Lebron used it in an August post that it went extremely viral. .
At Lebron’s original satirical TikTok videowhich has amassed more than 54 million views, the content creator shares how she ensures an understated personality in the workplace.
“See how I do my makeup at work? Very humble, very careful,” LeBron tells her followers, now at 2.3 million. “A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to work looking like Patty and Selma. Not modest.” The phrase “too humble, too careful” appeared to many thousands of videoswith many companies and brands using it in marketing campaigns and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez following the trend.
Every year, Dictionary.com chooses a word that captures the spirit. At the height of the “too careful, too modest” craze, the word frugal had 200 times more searches on Dictionary.com than on dates prior to August, the site said in a statement Monday announcing the word of the year. “Demure” usually describes someone who is reserved and demure, but Lebron used it humorously in a way that seemed to challenge and mock widespread societal expectations of how women should look and act.
“Brat” and “Brainrot” also make the list
To select the 2024 Word of the Year, Dictionary.com lexicographers analyzed data from headlines, social media trends and search results to identify words that reflect the past year’s cultural landscape.
“The rise and spread of the term on social media led to a similar increase in search interest on Google,” Dictionary.com reported. “Between August 2023 and July 2024, there was no significant trend in the use of the word ‘reduced.’ By the week of August 18, 2024, however, there was nearly 14 times more interest in the term, highlighting the term’s near-overnight explosion in popularity.”
Like “demure,” one of Dictionary.com’s 2024 list words, “brat,” got a new twist in 2024. Musician Charli XCX turned it from an insult to a compliment to describe someone with bold confidence when she wrote tweeted that “kamala IS brat,” after Vice President Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic presidential nominee.
The shortlisted term ‘brainrot’ refers to the well-known effect of removing excessively time-consuming, low-quality content on social media. Searches for the phrase spiked, Dictionary.com noted, amid global talk of record temperatures, devastating storms and widespread flooding.
Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2023 was “hallucinations,” followed by “woman” in 2022, “alliance” in 2021, and “pandemic” in 2020.
LeBron is clearly excited to be the driving force behind the site’s top pick for 2024. She shared a playful TikTok video reacting to the announcement in which she proudly poses and poses. Her demeanor in the video is anything but humble, deliberately proving the point.
