Board

Our premier American English dictionary company , Merriam-Webster,  just tweeted : "Fascism" is still our #1 lookup.  # of lookups = how we choose our word of the year.  There's still time to look something else up.  

    To avoid this crisis please go to http://www.merriam-webster.com/  and look up another English word so "fascism" does not become word of the year.  You could look up "weltanschauung".  It was a popular word back in the 60's when I was in college.  It is a magnificent English word.

Is it a crisis though? So many people looking up that word can mean anything... perhaps it's good that they try to educate themselves.

In any case, adding other lookups now doesn't change the issue that led to the work being looked up so often.

It is a stand in for the real crisis.  I am losing my country (that was making progress towards democracy)  to fascism with the election of Trump.  The educated among us have been naming Trump's ideas fascist.  About a third of our population had to look the word up in Webster to know what we were talking about.   I bet you knew this English word without using the dictionary  or did you just guess that it was the same as "Faschismus".  

 BTW good to see the name "Wolfgang" is current.  Few babies are named "Virginia" any more.