This list of every 'Word of the Year' is like taking a trip through time

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Hashtag. Metrosexual. Occupy.

Those three words have one thing in common — they've all been named "Word of the Year."

Every year since 1990, members of the American Dialect Society have gathered at their annual convention — once called "the Super Bowl of linguistics" — to crown the word that defined the year. The linguists and lexicographers vote on words based on their predominance in headlines and widespread use throughout the country.

Anything considered a "lexical item" can be nominated, meaning multi-word phrases like "dumpster fire" — named 2016's Word of the Year earlier this month — are fair game. The same goes for hashtags, prefixes, and even emoji.

Because each Word of the Year is closely tied with the era that spawned it, looking back at the list of every winner is like flipping through a yearbook of the past quarter-century. There's the surge of Internet-related words like "cyber" and "information superhighway" in the early 1990s and a string of political words like "chad" and "weapons of mass destruction" that reflected the climate of the early 2000s. 

More recently, tech words like "tweet" and "app" have dominated the vote, demonstrating how much the internet has influenced our language.

Take a look at every Word of the Year, and take a trip through time.

2016 — dumpster fire

Flickr Creative Commons/TRFD

The American Dialect Society chose "dumpster fire," a metaphor suggesting a poorly-handled or out-of-control situation, as 2016's Word of the Year on Friday.

The phrase saw a surge in popularity on social media to describe one of the most chaotic years in recent memory, which featured a bitterly contested US election, a stunning Brexit vote, and numerous high-profile deaths.

2015 — they

DaveBleasdale/Flickr

The word "they" has existed in English for nearly a millennium, but it wasn't until last year that it started to gain traction as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. The flexible pronoun can be used when "he" or "she" doesn't suffice for people who identify outside the traditional gender binary.

2014 — #blacklivesmatter

Associated Press/Branden Camp

2014 marked the first time a hashtag was named Word of the Year.

With the vote, linguists acknowledged the power of hashtags to convey social and political messages, as #blacklivesmatter did in addressing the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police.

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