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What word or Hot Movies Archivesexpression captures the 2019 mood?

If you ask Oxford Dictionaries, it's "climate emergency" which the dictionary dubbed its "word of the year" for 2019.

Oxford Dictionaries defines "climate emergency" as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it."

Decisions about Oxford Dictionary's word of the year follow an analysis of collected language data, as well as other indicators measuring cultural impact, in order to identify the word or expression that encapsulates "the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the year," while offering "lasting potential as a term of cultural significance," according to Oxford Dictionaries.

In its announcement, Oxford Dictionaries notes that "climate emergency" climbed from living in "relative obscurity" to becoming "one of the most prominent — and prominently debated — terms of 2019."

Its collected data finds that usage of the term in 2019 rose 10,796 percent from the previous year.

"Climate emergency" was selected from a shortlist of other phrases about climate, including "climate crisis," "climate action," "extinction," and "eco-anxiety."

While "climate" was central to language data collected in 2019 overall, "climate emergency" represented a new way people are using the word "emergency," according to its data.

In a series of tweets, Oxford Dictionaries explained that in 2018, people most commonly partnered the word "emergency" with "health," "hospital," and "family."

"These suggest acute situations of danger at a very personal level," it wrote in a tweet.

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But in 2019, with the growth in usage of "climate emergency," Oxford Dictionaries identified "an extension of emergency to the global level."

"This data is significant because it indicates a growing shift in people’s language choice in 2019, a conscious intensification that challenges accepted language use to reframe discussion of ‘the defining issue of our time’ with a new gravity and greater immediacy," it tweeted.

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Oxford Dictionary's "word of the year" decision aligns with Collins Dictionary's naming of "climate strike" asitsword of the year, in reference to the worldwide protests aimed at encouraging climate action, as Mashable reported earlier this month. Between 2018 and 2019, usage of "climate strike" increased 100-fold, according to Collins' lexicographers.

Meanwhile, hundreds of cities, and even some countries, declared "climate emergencies" in 2019, while 11,000 scientists from around the world also recommended the use of the term "climate emergency" to convey the gravity of climate change.

As Jeffrey Sherwood, an editor at Oxford Dictionaries, told Mashable, "Referring to what we’re living through as a climate emergency both reflects an awareness of the close link between the fate of the climate and the fate of human society while also emphasizing the impact of climate change on the human world."

UPDATE: Nov. 22, 2019, 2:41 p.m. EST Updated with comment from Oxford Dictionaries editor Jeffrey Sherwood.

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