The first few days of Donald Trump’s administration have—among other things—tested the vocabulary of Americans, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is here to help.
On Sunday, Merriam-Webster tweeted the definition of fact after Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway argued the existence of “alternative facts” in defending White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer after he made easily-disproved claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.
📈A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. Https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 22, 2017
In a blog post online, Merriam-Webster said lookups for the word fact spiked “dramatically” after Conway’s segment aired on NBC’s Meet the Press. The definition of the word is now helpfully pinned to the top of Merriam-Webster’s Twitter page.
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Merriam-Webster was back at it on Monday with the word claque, which saw an uptick in lookups after reports emerged that Trump had brought a group of campaign supporters to his meeting at the CIA. It was those people—not CIA staff—who had applauded the president’s message, according to CBS.
Spicer later denied that there were “Trump or White House folks” in the first rows, CBS reports.
If you're part of a group that's paid to applaud, you're a 'claqueur'. Https://t.co/EX96vGLGDz
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 24, 2017
“People have been paid to show enthusiasm at performances since ancient times, and the practice went from Greece and Rome to France in the 18th and 19th centuries,” according to the dictionary’s claque definition.
Merriam-Webster did not immediately return Coins2Day‘s request for comment on how it tracks lookup trends, but it seems that it is bipartisan in its approach. On Friday, it noted that lookups for “behoove” spiked after President Barack Obama used it in his remarks following Trump’s inauguration.
📈The word 'behoove' is as old as English itself. Https://t.co/m8th0Mug4i
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 20, 2017
“Michelle and I, we’ve really been milking this goodbye thing,” Obama said. “So it behooves me to be very brief.”
