Word of the year: shouty

‘Remind me what incel means again,’ said my husband. There was no point, since he’d forgotten twice already. I suspected a psychological barrier to learning. Incel (a label for people unhappy at being involuntarily celibate) was a runner-up for Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year, won by toxic.

But to me the word that captures the flavour of Britain this year is shouty. It identifies a trait that people dislike yet are given to. It belongs to an informal register (like not wearing a tie). Protesters are literally shouty, and metaphorically so are capital letters, some films and even aromatic food. There was sympathy, I read in the Guardian, for Theresa May being ‘surrounded by shouty men’.

Shouty belongs to a group of words expanding in number in the 19th century, such as beery or catty. They were formed freely to express ridicule or contempt.