Springfield, Massachusetts - Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster singled out "gaslighting" as the word of the year on Monday, saying it reflects the current "age of misinformation."

According to Merriam-Webster, in 2022 there was a 1740% increase in searches for the word, which comes from the title of a 1938 play about a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane.

Merriam-Webster defines gaslighting as "the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one's own advantage."

"In recent years, with the vast increase in channels and technologies used to mislead, gaslighting has become the favored word for the perception of deception. This is why (trust us!) it has earned its place as our Word of the Year," Merriam-Webster editors said.

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Other words shortlisted for the title included "omicron," which is the Greek alphabet letter used to name a particularly contagious variant of the coronavirus, and "sentient." Searches for "sentient" spiked after a Google engineer claimed the company's AI chatbot had developed a human-like consciousness.

Other contenders this year were oligarch, codify, LGBTQIA, loamy, raid and Queen Consort. When announcing the shortlist to Twitter, Merriam-Webster joked, "Bonus points (which have no cash value) will be awarded to anyone who can use all of these words (and gaslighting) in a single sentence."

Merriam-Webster's word of the year doesn't have to be a "recently created word. It is "a statistical measure" of what people used the dictionary to look up over the past year, it said in another tweet.

In 2021, Merriam- Webster's word of the year was vaccine.