Linguists Have Officially Dubbed ‘-Ussy’ as Word of the Year

The evolution of language on the Internet is truly fascinating, and future linguists will shake their heads at the American Dialect Society’s choice Word of the year 2022: “-ussi.”

The “-ussy” suffix is ​​a callback to the word “pussy” and has exploded across the internet in recent years. “-ussy” was next to “quiet cessation“, “Rizz‘ and ‘Slava Ukraine’, which translates to ‘Honour of Ukraine’. The suffix is ​​typically combined with a word to form a portmanteua with a new meaning. A common use is to combine “-ussy” with “boy” to get “occupied‘ which can now refer to a man’s anus.

“The selection of the ‘-ussy’ suffix underscores how creativity in forming new words has been embraced online in places like TikTok,” Ben Zimmer said in a statement. Zimmer is a linguist, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and Chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. “The playful suffix builds on the word ‘pussy’ to generate new slang terms. The process has been so prolific lately on social media sites and elsewhere that it’s been dubbed ‘ussification’.”

One of the earliest uses of the “-ussy” suffix was in a meme involving Mr. Krabs from the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants Set to a song from the now-defunct text-to-singing app Ditty.it. In the video, a female voice sings “Mr. Krabs is a Thicc Bih. Let me see that Krussy,” a combination of Krabs and ‘-ussy’ to indicate the character’s big butt. The meme format emerged a wave of similar videos in the early 2010s with various characters and people for the punchline.

The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year adds to the growing list of internet-related words that went viral in 2022. Oxford crowned the meme phrase “goblin mode” as word of the year Merriam-Webster named “Gaslight”— a mental health term that gained traction on social media this year — as word of the year.