Sadly, the highest-ranking word in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary—determined by the frequency of searches—is currently “fascism.”

“There’s still time to look something else up,” the dictionary’s Twitter feed announced last week in a nudge toward its users to look up something a bit cheerier, or else less depressing. (After all, Dictionary.com’s word of the year was “xenophobia,” Oxford Dictionaries’ was “post-truth,” Cambridge Dictionary’s was “paranoid,” and Collins’s was “Brexit.”)

Merriam-Webster had an apt suggestion that may or may not be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the president-elect’s many gaffes: look up “flummadiddle,” which means “something foolish or worthless.”

One tweeter said they had searched for “puppies” a total of 523 times in the span of a half-hour last week; and as of Monday, December 5, “puppy” was the top trending word.

But neither puppy nor flummadiddle will become the Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster’s blog reads.

“Our Word of the Year cannot be rigged. We encourage people to look up new words at all times, particularly if those words are strange 19th-century Americanisms or words for adorable doll-like creatures, but our Word of the Year is based on year-over-year increase in lookups. We look for a word which got a high number of lookups and increased dramatically in popularity when compared to previous years.”

Still, puppy’s etymological history is interesting in its own right. According to the same blog post, “Puppy comes from the Middle English popi, which in turn comes from the Middle French poupée ("doll, toy").”

Related news: Who’s the genius behind Merriam-Webster’s Twitter feed? Emily Temple explored this question in a post for Lit Hub last month.

Photo credit: Screen shot of Merriam-Webster Website, 5:09 p.m., 12/5/16