'Climate emergency' is 2019 Oxford Word of the Year

Oxford Dictionaries has named 'climate emergency' as its Word of the Year for 2019.

The word is defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”.

The term 'climate emergency' has been used by activists and pro-climate action politicians to signify the need for urgent action to tackle climate change.

The use of the term “climate emergency” increased by a hundredfold since 2018, according to data collected in the Oxford Corpus, a database containing hundreds of millions of words of written English and cited in a New York Times report.