“Manifest” has been picked as Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024.
Popstar Dua Lipa and world-famous gymnast Simone Biles have both spoken about manifesting their own success in the modern sense of the term.
The term has gained traction on social media and was looked up almost 130,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary website this year.
Lexicographers said the term “to manifest” has evolved to mean “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen”.
Wendalyn Nichols, publishing manager of the Cambridge Dictionary, said the use of the word manifest had “widened greatly across all types of media due to events in 2024, and it shows how the meanings of a word can change over time”.
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But despite its rising popularity, Dr Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology at Cambridge University, said the idea of making something happen by “manifesting” it had no scientific validity.
He said it was what psychologists call “magical thinking” or the “general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us”.
Dr van der Linden added there was good research on the value of positive thinking and goal setting – but stressed this was different from manifesting.
The likes of Dua Lipa have spoken publicly about manifesting. The singer said she manifested headlining Glastonbury earlier in life when she achieved her goal this summer.
Last year’s Cambridge word of the year was “hallucinate”.
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How has the meaning of manifest changed over time?
The word manifest, borrowing from Latin and French, was first used as an adjective meaning ‘easily noticed or obvious’ and appeared in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1380 – “It is cleer and manyfest that it is propre to the devyne thought.”
When Shakespeare later used the word in his work The Merchant Of Venice, it was still an adjective and meant ‘shown clearly, through signs or actions’.
He wrote: “For it appears, by manifest proceeding, that indirectly, and directly too, thou hast contriv’d against the very life of the defendant…”
By 1793, manifest was being used as a noun and meant ‘an official list of people and goods carried on a ship’.
Several decades later, manifest took on a new dimension as a verb, meaning ‘to appear’ – more similar to the modern-day usage – but in relation to a ghost or spirit.
By the 20th century, being used in The St Joseph Observer, the term resembled the word that is so popular on TikTok and other social media platforms.
