Who would have thought dictionaries would be the best shade-throwers of the 21st century? Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com have put everyone from Kylie Jenner to Jay-Z to Donald Trump in their place with savage takedowns. Relive the dictionaries’ best disses ever below.
Credit: Forbes; Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images; Kris Connor/Getty Images
Who would have thought dictionaries would be the best shade-throwers of the 21st century? Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com have put everyone from Kylie Jenner to Jay-Z to Donald Trump in their place with savage takedowns. Relive the dictionaries’ best disses ever below.
Credit: Forbes; Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images; Kris Connor/Getty Images
Who would have thought dictionaries would be the best shade-throwers of the 21st century? Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com have put everyone from Kylie Jenner to Jay-Z to Donald Trump in their place with savage takedowns. Relive the dictionaries’ best disses ever below.
Credit: Forbes
The youngest KarJenner landed on the cover of Forbes’ “Self-Made Women” issue in July 2018, but Dictionary.com was not thrilled with the magazine’s choice. “Self-made means having succeeded in life unaided,” the website tweeted. “Used in a sentence: Forbes says that Kylie Jenner is a self-made woman.”
Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
Has Merriam-Webster been talking to Becky with the good hair? After Jay-Z released his 4:44 album in June 2017, confirming rumors that he cheated on wife Beyoncé, the dictionary tweeted, “’Fidelity’ is the #WordOfTheDay,” alongside a GIF of the rapper cringing.
Credit: Kris Connor/Getty Images
Merriam-Webster began trolling Donald Trump when he was campaigning for the 2016 presidential election. The former reality star’s many spelling slipups on Twitter and mispronounced words make him an easy target, so the teasing has been frequent. The dictionary compared “hombre” and “ombre” after Trump’s “bad hombres” comment during a debate in October 2016, defined “bigly” and “big league” for those confused by the president’s favorite phrase and was left speechless when the commander in chief infamously tweeted about “covfefe” in May 2017.
Dictionary.com tackled Trump again in July 2018 after the backlash of his comments at the 2018 Russia–United States summit, which was a meeting between the U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Responsible means ‘answerable or accountable, as for something within one's power, control, or management,’” the tweet read. “Behold the use of responsible in this sentence: President Trump says he holds both the U.S. and Russia responsible for the latter attacking the former's election.” Dictionary.com’s account also retweeted Thesaurus.com’s post about the summit: “Disaster is one word. Calamity, catastrophe, debacle and fiasco are four other ways to say the same thing. #TrumpPutin #Synonyms.”
The account also defined Patriot and Traitor as #Treason and #TreasonSummit both trended after the summit. “Patriot: A person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion,” the tweet read. “Traitor: A person who commits treason by betraying his or her country.”
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Remember this defense? Merriam-Webster sprang into action when Conway proposed that Sean Spicer’s exaggerated statements about the size of President Trump’s inauguration crowd were simply “alternative facts.” The dictionary tweeted in January 2017, “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” Then another retort followed: “*whispers into the void* In contemporary use, fact is understood to refer to something with actual existence.”
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When Whittaker was announced as the first female to play the titular character in Doctor Who in July 2017, some fans revolted. Merriam-Webster shut them down with six words, though. “’Doctor’ has no gender in English,” the dictionary tweeted.
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The Washington Post reported in December 2017 that Vice President Pence praised President Trump every 12 seconds during a cabinet meeting. Dictionary.com had the perfect response, tweeting, “There’s a word for a person who would praise someone every 12 seconds,” and linking to the website’s definition of sycophant.
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The businesswoman made headlines in April 2017 when she claimed she didn’t know what “complicit” meant after she was accused of embodying that very term while working for her father. “’Complicit’ is trending after Ivanka Trump told CBS ‘I don’t know what it means to be complicit,’” Merriam-Webster tweeted, while offering her the link to the word’s definition.
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