The Macquarie Dictionary is Australia's national dictionary, first published in 1981 by Macquarie University. It is the authoritative reference for Australian English and is widely consulted by courts, government bodies, and media organizations across Australia and the broader Anglophone world.
The Macquarie Dictionary named "enshittification" its 2024 Word of the Year — a landmark moment of institutional recognition for the concept Doctorow coined and developed on pluralistic-net and in the-internet-con. The selection validated enshittification as a genuine linguistic and conceptual contribution rather than mere internet slang, and gave the term a durability and respectability that accelerated its adoption in journalism, policy circles, and academic writing.
The recognition by Macquarie came alongside nomination of "enshittification" by the American Dialect Society as a significant word of 2023–2024, marking the term's full crossover from tech commentary into mainstream discourse. The enshittification-word-of-the-year-2023 event captures the broader cultural moment of this recognition.
For Doctorow, the dictionary recognition was strategically important: a precisely defined, memorable term for platform-decay-cycle dynamics gave journalists, regulators, and ordinary users a shared vocabulary for describing what they were experiencing. lina-khan's concept of monopoly harm, tim-wu's work on platform power, and matt-stoller's industrial policy arguments all describe related phenomena, but "enshittification" gave the pattern a name anyone could use.