The use of the...

The use of the term “climate emergency” increased by a hundredfold since 2018, according to data collected in the Oxford Corpus, a database containing hundreds of millions of words of written English. In fact, it was the most common compound involving “emergency,” occurring three times as often as the next most-common, “health emergency.”

In part, Ms. Martin noted, this reflects a deliberate decision by some news organizations, including The Guardian^[1], to use “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” instead of “climate change,” to better convey the urgency of the situation.

Oxford’s choice of an all-environmental shortlist, Ms. Martin said, did not reflect a similar deliberate attention to focus people’s attention, but a reading, if a necessarily subjective one, of the lexicographic evidence.

“When we considered all the possibilities, a narrative really coalesced this year around words associated with ecological concerns,” she said.