‘Complicit’ Is The 2017 Word Of The Year, Dictionary.com Says (Video)

Dictionary.com has selected “complicit” as its word of the year for 2017, citing the term’s renewed relevance in U.S. culture and politics — and noting that a refusal to be complicit has also been “a grounding force of 2017.”

The website defines “complicit” as “choosing to be involved in an illegal or questionable act, especially with others; having complicity.”

Interest in the word spiked several times this year, Dictionary.com says — most notably when Ivanka Trump said in April, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.”

That remark came weeks after Saturday Night Live aired a segment in which Scarlett Johansson portrayed President Trump’s daughter in a skit to tout a luxury fragrance called Complicit. Its tagline: “The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.”

The term spiked a third time, Dictionary.com says, after Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., announced in October that he won’t seek re-election to Congress, citing a “flagrant disregard for truth or decency” in the Trump administration.