Merriam-Webster announced on Tuesday that it has chosen "they" as its 2019 word of the year.
The dictionary shared that lookups for the personal pronoun increased by 313% compared to last year.
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In September, Merriam-Webster added a new definition to its online dictionary to reflect the use of "they" as referring to a person whose gender identity is nonbinary.
That month, British singer Sam Smith announced their preferred pronouns are they/them.
As Merriam-Webster noted in its announcement for word of the year, many followed Smith's lead and it's now increasingly common to see a person's preferred pronouns in Twitter bios, email signatures and on name tags.
Runners-up for the word of the year include "quid pro quo," a phrase that has been repeated in the Donald Trump impeachment hearings, and "crawdad," a word in the title of Delia Owens' best-selling book "Where the Crawdads Sing."
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