The 'word of the year' sums up 2016

The annual Oxford Dictionaries "word of the year" can reveal a lot about the world we live in. And this year it's very telling.

Last year a "pictograph" was chosen for the first time ever. A "face with tears of joy emoji" 😂 which best represented "the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.

This year the word is "post-truth".

Defined as an adjective "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".

Over the course of 2016, mentions of the word snowballed in the context of Brexit and the US presidential election.

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The term 'post-truth' was used for the first time in this particular context in a 1992 essay from The Nation magazine, according to Oxford Dictionaries.

The essay cites the Iran-contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, and says "post-truth" grew from a fringe, technical term to become a mainstay in political commentary.

It is associated overwhelmingly with a particular noun in the phrase "post-truth politics".

"Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time," said Casper Grathwohl of Oxford Dictionaries.

"We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination," Grathwohl continued.

Frequency of the word increased by 2,000% over the last year. The Oxford English Corpus collects roughly 150 million words of spoken and written English from various sources each month.

The other words in the shortlist -- from alt-right to coulrophobia (a fear of clowns) -- also sum up 2016 pretty well:

• Adulting, The practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks

• Alt-right, An ideological grouping associated with extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints, characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content

• Brexiteer, A person who is in favour of the UK withdrawing from the European Union

• Chatbot, A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet

• Coulrophobia, Extreme or irrational fear of clowns

• Glass cliff, Used with reference to a situation in which a woman or member of a minority group ascends to a leadership position in challenging circumstances where the risk of failure is high

• Hygge, A quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture)

• Latinx, A person of Latin American origin or descent, used as a gender-neutral or non-binary alternative to Latino or Latina

• Woke, Originally in African-American usage meaning alert to injustice in society, especially racism