Drumroll, please. Dictionary.com names 'identity' word of the year

Dictionary.com named "identity" its 2015 Word of the Year on Tuesday.

CEO Liz McMillan said they chose the word “identity” because of an uptick in lookups on Dictionary.com for “identity-related” words such as transgender, cisgender and omnisexual.

“Our data indicated a growing interest in words related to identity, as people encountered new terms throughout the year based on events tied to gender, sexuality, race, and other key issues,” McMillan said in a statement.

McMillian credits the increased interest in identity-related words to a “shift in the way society thinks about identity as being more fluid.”

Identity wasn’t solely linked to gender and sexuality, but also to racial identity, according to Dicitionary.com.

The site points to Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP chapter president, who is white but identifies as a black woman.

In November, Oxford Dictionaries announced its ‘Word of the Year’  wasn’t a word but instead an emoji.

An analysis of words and emojis, or icons used to express an idea or emotion, showed that the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji "best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015,"  according to Oxford University Press and SwiftKey.

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