It has been an extraordinary year, so extraordinary that it required a new word to describe it. It was an apt word for the annus horribilis that was in 2022.
"Perma crisis" became Collins Dictionary's word of the year and was one of several that broke through.
For the first time in this newspaper's history, there are examples of lesser-used words and terms that are frequently repeated due to a running story.
The year began with the words "Partygate", "lockdown-busting", "rule-breaking", and "Sue Gray" dominating the most common words in January.
The word scurrilous came to the fore after Boris Johnson used it to describe Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions.
March was notable for the start of the horror for Ukrainians, with several place names appearing with distressing regularity. #IstandWithUkraine appeared on the website. Oxford's top three words of the year were "goblin mode", "metaverse" and "I stand with you"
The first use of the term "permacrisis" in the Guardian was appropriate given the events that preceded it.
Politics was always in the headlines. Akshata Murthy was in the news again in April after a leak caused her to confirm her use of the tax loophole.
The "Wagatha Christie" trial opened in London's high court in May with Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy taking the stand.
In June, when news broke that a researcher at the company had been suspended, it pushed the word "sentient" into the top 10 words on the Guardian website. Guardian readers were introduced to the acronym LaMDA with the unusual mix of capitals and lower-case letters differentiating it from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
The UK registered a maximum temperature over 40C in July, breaking the previous record of 38.7C.
Two completely new concepts appeared on the Guardian's pages in August. Quiet quitting is just a term for doing the job you were hired to do, no more, no less, leaving on time and not taking out-of-hours email and calls. The Observer explained it for the first time in August, as the term was going global, but it also merited an entire section in the first dog on the moon.
splooting is when mammals lie on their bellies on hot days to help them cool down.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II and the national mourning period took place in September. Millions of people around the world watched the coffin of the Queen rest on a raised platform called a Catafalque, one of several words connected to the funeral and the monarchy that were used with far more regularity that month.
The politics pages documented the rise and fall of Liz and Kwarteng with mention of their disastrous mini-budget, a term that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Manston, the asylum center in Kent, was overcrowded in November. In November, it was found that the centre was housing 2.5 times more people than intended.
A term more associated with fashion appeared on the sports pages of the Guardian. The subject of a cheerful feature on Welsh fans became a news story when rainbow versions of the hats were removed from fans entering stadiums during the first few days of the tournament.
In December, a shade of carmine red that was described as an "audacious" shade of red, became the colour that captured the Zeitgeist of 2022. The executive director of the Pantone Color Institute said that it depicted optimism and joy. We are all in need of that.
Jonnie Robinson, the British Library's lead curator for spoken English, tracks word frequencies in this way to show thelexical innovation that marks the constant evolution of language.
Blending and affixation are examples of typical processes used when forming new words and captures the playful appeal of innovative forms.
How well any of these forms survive remains to be seen, but their presence in the Guardian confirms and reinforces their prominence in popular discourse.
In order to find the words identified in this article, a programatically searching for " significant terms" and manually searching for new words was used. To gather "Significant terms", a background was created to count the frequencies of terms across all content available in the GuardianAPI, some of which dates back as far as 1899. A foreground query that counted the frequencies of terms in each subset was also done. The terms that were more frequently in the foreground were considered significant.
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