After Oxford's "toxic" and Dictionary.com's "misinformation", Merriam-Webster has now revealed its word of the year

Racial justice. Obstruction of justice. Social justice. Justice Department. Merriam-Webster has chosen "justice" as its 2018 word of year, driven by churning news cycle over months and months.

word follows "toxic," picked by Oxford Dictionaries, and "misinformation," plucked by Dictonary.com.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, told Associated Press ahe of Monday's anuncement that "justice" consistently bubbled into top 20 or 30 lookups on company's website, spiking at times due to specific events but also skating close to surface for much of year.

While it's one of those common words people likely kw how to spell and use correctly in a sentence, Sokolowski pointed to or reasons that drive search traffic. Among m is an attempt to focus a train of thought around a philosophical problem, or to seek aspirational motivation. Such well-kwn words are often among most looked up every year, including those that are slightly abstract, including "love," he said.

designation for "justice" came soon after President Trump's one-time fixer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included arranging payment of hush money to conceal his boss' alleged sexual affairs.

He told a judge he agreed a time and again to cover up Trump's "dirty deeds" out of "blind loyalty." It also came ahe of a Senate vote on "First Step Act," a criminal justice reform bill with bro bipartisan support.

Earlier in year, Kim Kardashian West t once but twice paid a White House visit on Trump to discuss prison and sentencing reform. Sentencing for drug crimes, treatment for opioid diction, a loosening of cannabis laws, a Tesla probe, Mueller investigation into Trump campaign: Justice will remain top of mind into new year.

"se are stories that connect to culture and to society across races, across classes," Sokolowski said. "We get this word that filters in." That includes Twitter in a big way.

Often, when Trump tweets about Department of Justice, he uses simply "Justice." On Aug. 1, when he tweeted his wish for n-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop Mueller investigation, searches spiked significantly. Trump referred to "obstruction of justice," a separate entry on Merriam-Webster site, prompting a lookup increase of 900 percent over same date year before.

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Searches for "justice" throughout year, when compared to 2017, were up 74 percent on site that has more than 100 million p views a month and nearly half a million entries, Sokolowski said. To be word of year worthy, an entry has to show both a high volume of traffic and a significant year-over-year increase in lookups as opposed to, say, a word that merely buzzed or felt lofty, he said.

"We are t editorialising. We looked at our data and we were ourselves surprised by this word," Sokolowski said. "This is a word that people have been thinking about for this entire year." word "justice" comes from Latin, unlike a lot of more emotional words that rose in Old English. Old English did have "law," ''fair" and "right," but never "justice," in reference to a system of laws.

"It's t a coincidence that it comes from 12th century, which immediately follows rman conquest. When rmans inved England y brought ir langu, Old French, which was basically n-modern version of Latin.

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"y brought ir system of government and laws and imposed m on people y conquered, and that's why all of legal langu in English today is Latin, just like word justice," Sokolowski explained. "It took imposition of a system of laws to bring us word justice." One rule breaker: "witness," a word with a purely Old English start.

Or words that experienced lookup spikes this year: "maverick" (Sen. John McCain died); "respect" (Aretha Franklin died); "excelsior" (Stan Lee's signature battle cry. He died); "pissant" (A rio host described Tom Bry's daughter that way); "pansexual" (Janelle Monae described herself that way); "laurel" (Remember laurel vs yanny?); "feckless" (What Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump, combined with a pejorative that begins with "c''); "epiphany" ( title of a BTS K-pop song that dropped this year); "lodestar" (used in reference to McCain in anymous New York Times op-ed identified as coming from inside Trump ministration); and "nationalism" (At an Oct. 22 rally in Texas, Trump declared himself a nationalist)