‘Dana’, the word of the year for EL PAÍS readers | Culture

“What is, for you, the word of the year?” EL PAÍS asked this question the second week of December to its readers of both the newspaper and . After receiving more than 1,400 responses in one week, there is a winner: Dana has been the term that readers have repeated the most, followed – although at a great distance – by guerra y bulo.

The climate tragedy of last October 29, which left 223 fatalities in the province of Valencia, seven in Castilla-La Mancha and one in Andalusia, has left its mark on the readers of this newspaper: more than 220 of the 1,491 participants in a open response survey have chosen dana as word of the year. Furthermore, nearly a hundred responses are of other words linked to the catastrophe: from barro o barnacle a resilience, volunteers o resurface.

The EL PAÍS survey also allowed readers to justify their choice. They have highlighted Dana’s “serious emotional impact on the entire Spanish society”, which has been “commented upon all over the world” or that “it will forever be a (horrible) memory for our country.” Also that it is “an original Spanish word and not an Anglicism.” It is an acronym for ‘isolated high-level depression’, a pocket of air in the upper layers of the atmosphere. And just, among other terms. It was coined by. In this link you can read what he told

After dana, the most repeated words in the EL PAÍS survey have been war, hoax, uncertainty, genocide, mud, polarization or conflict, although very far from Dana. Guerra, the second most repeated, has been named by 68 readers compared to 228 of dana.

The initiative to ask the readers of EL PAÍS what their word of the year has been is inspired by similar proposals such as that of the Oxford dictionary or that of the Fundación del Español Urgente (FundéuRAE), which has been choosing for more than a decade what it is, for the institution, the most relevant word of each year. , , or have been some of the last ones selected. Dana, mud, fatphobia, mena, narcolancha and ‘woke’, are among the candidates for this year’s word according to the FundéuRAE, while Oxford .

Below, you can see a list of the words that at least 10 readers have chosen as word of the year: