'Complicit' Becomes Dictionary.com's Word of the Year in 2017

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."

UCJ, UNILORIN.