In 2024, the macquarie-dictionary — Australia's national dictionary and one of the authoritative references for Anglophone English — named "enshittification" its Word of the Year. The selection recognized Doctorow's coinage as a genuine linguistic contribution: a term that filled a gap in the language by naming a real and widespread phenomenon that previously lacked a common descriptor.
The timing aligned with the broader cultural moment of enshittification recognition. The defcon-31-enshittification-talk-2023 in August 2023 had brought the term to a mass technical audience, and subsequent media coverage — in mainstream publications that would not normally cover tech policy terminology — accelerated its spread. The American Dialect Society also nominated "enshittification" as a significant word in its annual process, confirming that the recognition was not limited to any one national context.
For Doctorow, the dictionary recognition mattered strategically as well as personally. The enshittification framework describes platform-decay-cycle dynamics: platforms first deliver good products to attract users, then degrade the product to extract value, then further degrade it to please business customers at users' expense. Having a precise, memorable, dictionary-legitimate term for this pattern gave journalists, regulators, and ordinary users a shared vocabulary. lina-khan's FTC, tim-wu's work on platform power, and matt-stoller's antitrust advocacy all describe related phenomena, but none of them had a term as sticky as enshittification.
The word's adoption was itself an example of the dynamics it describes: it spread virally through the exact social and media infrastructure that was being enshittified, before that infrastructure degraded enough to stop transmitting new vocabulary.