This year Oxford’s “Word of the Year” (WOTY) contest has three keywords with the Metaverse as one of them. The public for the first time also gets to vote on which keyword attains the title.
On November 22, OUP formally announced the competition’s beginning and the names of its three 2022 finalists. This is the first year that the public will be able to vote for the WOTY.
The keywords “#IStandWith” and “Goblin Mode” will compete with “Metaverse.”
It was characterized as “a hypothetical virtual reality environment in which users interact with one another’s avatars and their surroundings in an immersive fashion” in OUP’s video proposal for the Metaverse.
According to the video, the phrase originally appeared in the 1990s and was first used in Neil Stephenson’s science fiction book Snow Crash in 1992, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to Oxford, the use of “Metaverse” has increased fourfold since October 2021. According to the video, as more activities connected to daily life and employment take place in virtual reality settings, “more disputes about the ethics and viability of a totally online future” may result.
Regarding the other two WOTY contenders, “#IStandWith” has become a more popular hashtag for political action, and “Goblin Mode” is a post-COVID-19 lockdown idea in which one resists “returning back to normal” and instead does what they want to do.
OUP said that they conducted an analysis of a linguistic data system to exclude options until just three phrasal verbs remained.
Voters must formally cast their ballots on the Oxford Languages website for “Metaverse” or the other two contenders. As of now, almost 237,000 votes have been cast, and voting is scheduled to end on December 2, when the winning word would be revealed by Oxford.
As of this writing, a Twitter survey conducted by OUP found that 63% of 929 respondents preferred “Goblin Mode,” followed by “Metaverse” at 22%, and “#IStandWith” at 15%.
The Metaverse is expected to be a substantial sector in the near future, regardless of the poll’s findings. A recent assessment by the worldwide consulting company McKinsey estimated that technology connected to the Metaverse would be valued at $5 trillion by 2030.
The entire addressable market for the Metaverse economy may fall between $8 to 13 trillion during the same time period, according to Citi, an investment firm.
The blockchain and cryptocurrency industries, as well as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rename Facebook to Meta in October 2021 and its subsequent advances on its Metaverse goods via its Reality Labs division, have all had a big impact on how people interpret the Metaverse.
