Throughout Africa, words like “Demure“, “Artificial Intelligence“, and “Philosophy” captured a lot of people’s attention—but search data suggests that many people may not fully understand their meaning.
A new study from WordTips analyzed Google search data to uncover the most searched-for word definitions in every country.
“There is no nation without language, because there’s no collectivity without a language,” says Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. “[L]anguage is more than simply the way that the nation communicates with itself. Language is the instrument to create history and also a vision of where the nation is going.”
The words we choose, the words we borrow and the way we interpret them — even within the same language — are both personal and political. While we may not need language to think, words are how we articulate our thoughts and shape our (collective) identities. And so it is that word meanings evolve and come to fit our world as our cultures change and grow — with old words often growing into new uses that leave many of us grappling for dictionaries, “Urban” or otherwise.
In our new study, data scientists at WordTips found the word definition that each country searched for the most in 2024.
Using the Keyword Research Tool from Semrush, we ranked words based on the volume of Google searches for their definitions.
Searches were conducted in local languages to uncover the most googled word definitions worldwide.
Key Findings
- Demure, Fascism and Resilience are the most searched-for word definitions in six countries each.
- The most searched-for definition in the S. is Gaslighting, which has 110,000 monthly searches.
- The UK’s most searched-for definition is Diversity (9,900 monthly searches).
- Integrity is Canada’s most searched-for definition (8,100 monthly searches).
- In Australia, Genocide is the most searched-for definition, with 4,400 monthly
