Children absorb a lot more information than we might give them credit for – especially when it comes to words. And now they’ve chosen just one to sum up 2022.
In a poll by Oxford University Press, more than 4,000 children aged between six and 14 were asked to choose a word that represented last year. And the one they went with? ‘Queen’.
It wasn’t just her death in September that may have inspired them. The UK’s longest-serving monarch also celebrated 70 years on the throne as part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June.
Of the group interviewed, 46 percent nominated Queen as their word of the year. OUP said the results highlighted how tuned in children are to current affairs.
Previous Oxford Children’s Words of the Year have included ‘anxiety’ (2021), ‘coronavirus’ (2020), ‘Brexit’ (2019), ‘plastic’ (2018), Trump (2017) and ‘refugee’ (2016).
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