Metaverse ranks second in Oxford’s word of the year category

The Oxford University Press team chose ‘metaverse’ as the ‘Goblin Mode’ runner-up for word of the year in 2022.

In a December 4 announcement, Oxford Languages ​​said the viral term ‘goblin mode’ had surpassed ‘metaverse’ and millions of other words to become the team’s 2022 word of the year. According to Oxford research, use of the term metaverse “increased nearly four times over the previous year in the Oxford Corpus,” driven in part by Facebook’s rebranding to Meta in October 2021.

Metaverse lost first place to ‘Goblin mode,’ a phrase that went viral in February, which “captured the prevailing mood of people who rejected the idea of ​​going back to ‘normal life'” after they got up the COVID lockdowns in many areas. #IStandWith took…