Is your rizz authentic? New Yorkers weigh in on the word of the year.

This year, 650 new words were added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, including “jorts,” “grammable” and “rizz.”

If you have a teenager, you know what “rizz” means. (And if you don’t, it means “romantic appeal or charisma,” according to the dictionary.)

But what word captures 2023? It’s been a year in which artificial intelligence exploded into the mainstream, union workers across industries went on strike, and two female musicians – Taylor Swift and Beyoncé – bolstered an entire economy.

According to Merriam-Webster, the word of 2023 is “authentic.”

“Although clearly a desirable quality, ‘authentic’ is hard to define and subject to debate, two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary,” the company said in its announcement of the word of the year.

Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, joined Alison Stewart on a recent episode of “All of It” to discuss how the dictionary chose the word of the year, what it tells us about this moment, and some words that quite didn’t make the cut.

During their conversation, New Yorkers called in with some of their picks for the word that best describes 2023.

You can hear their whole discussion here; an edited version is below.

Stewart: Why do you think “authentic” is a difficult concept to define?

Sokolowski: Abstract ideas are harder to define than concrete words. A definition for chair or table is interesting but when you’re talking about ideas, it gets a little bit more complicated.

However, the two definitions that count for “authentic” are refreshingly simple. The first sense is “not false or imitation.” And sense two is: “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.”

Nice, short definitions for a word that really encapsulates a big idea.

How do you select the word of the year?

It comes from when we first put the dictionary online in 1996. For the first time, we could see which words sent people to the dictionary.

We could see which words were being…