'Manifest' is Cambridge Dictionary's 2024 word of the year, because maybe the universe listens
Old word gets new life as celebrities, influencers channel their dreams into success
You might say they put it out to the universe.
Cambridge Dictionary has announced that its 2024 word of the year is "manifest," a formal 600-year-old word that's been given new life by Olympians like Simone Biles, entertainers like Dua Lipa, and people across social media who increasingly use the word to describe channelling their dreams into successes.
As a verb, manifest means to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to "help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen," the dictionary explains on its website.
Prior to 2024, the word was mainly used in the self-help community, according to Cambridge Dictionary. But that changed this year as U.S. gymnast Biles talked about manifesting her success at the Paris Olympics, and singer Dua Lipa of the album Radical Optimism said she manifested headlining to a crowd of 100,000 fans at the Glastonbury music festival.
"If you set an intention and you think about it every single day of your life, and for me, Glastonbury for example, when I first started making music I dreamed about the day that I would get asked to headline Glastonbury," the singer said in an April interview with the Zack Sang Show.
A rise in "manifesting influencers" also promotes the practice on social media as part of the trillion-dollar global wellness market, according to the Marketplace Morning Report. On TikTok, there are 1.6 million videos tagged with the hashtag #manifesting.
This year, manifest was looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary website more than 130,000 times.
"When we choose a Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year, we have three considerations: user data, zeitgeist, and language. What word was looked up the most, or spiked? Which one really captures what was happening in that year? And what is interesting about this word from a language point of view?" Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary's publishing manager, said in a news release.
"Manifest won this year because it increased notably in lookups, its use widened greatly across all types of media, and it shows how the meanings of a word can change over time."
Manifesting manifest
Google searches for "manifesting" started skyrocketing globally in 2020, increasing nearly 430 per cent between March and July that year alone, according to Google Trends data.
Taken from Latin and French, manifest was first used in English as an adjective meaning "easily noticed or obvious," then a verb that meant "to show something clearly," according to Cambridge. It appeared in Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece as an adjective in 1380, where the author wrote, "It is cleer and manyfest that it is propre to the devyne thought."
Now, on TikTok and Instagram, influencers like Toronto "mindset coach" Alicia Tghilian and U.S. influencer Laura Galebe teach followers "the best way to manifest anything," and "how to manifest anything you want in 2024."
It's also commonly used by athletes, like U.S. marathon swimmer Ivan Puskovitch, who said in an interview with WDTV that he visualized qualifying for the Olympics.
"My whole life I've been writing it down, writing it down, trying to physically manifest it, verbally manifest, visually manifest it," the swimmer said in February. "And I never would've written that goal down if I didn't think it was something I could achieve."
Manifest joins the ranks of "brat" as one of this year's top words. Collins Dictionary declared "brat" — the album title that became a summer-living ideal — its 2024 word of the year. Oxford Dictionary has yet to announce its word for 2024 but the short list includes brain rot, demure, dynamic pricing, lore, romantasy and slop.
Last year, Oxford's word of the year was "rizz," defined by the dictionary as "style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner." Cambridge Dictionary's 2023 word of the year was "hallucinate," a reflection of the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
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