After top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” on Sunday, Merriam-Webster decided to weigh in by reminding everybody that some definitions just aren’t that subjective.
In an interview Sunday morning, Conway argued that White House press secretary Sean Spicer wasn’t lying about crowd size at Donald Trump’s inauguration—he was just giving “alternative facts.”
Lookups of the word “fact” spiked after Conway’s impromptu semantic innovation, according to Merriam-Webster, which tweeted its own definition.
?A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 22, 2017
In the last year, Merriam-Webster weighed in on Donald Trump’s misspelled tweets, went apocalyptic in honor of the presidential election and summed up 2016 with its word of the year: “surreal.”