Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday morning that Sean Spicer was offering “alternative facts.” | Getty Did a dictionary diss Trump team's 'alternative facts'?

Merriam-Webster poked at the Trump administration through its Twitter feed, appearing to take senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to task for saying that press secretary Sean Spicer was offering up “alternative facts” about the crowd size at the inauguration.

“A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality,” the dictionary company said in a pinned tweet that linked to a Merriam-Webster posting about how lookups for the word “fact” spiked after Conway’s comment.


Conway, counselor to Trump, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday morning that Spicer was offering “alternative facts” when he told reporters Saturday night during an impromptu briefing that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” (Aerial footage and Metro ridership statistics show that attendance was down significantly from President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.)

“Alternative facts are not facts,” Todd responded. “They’re falsehoods.”

Merriam-Webster also noted on Twitter on Sunday that the word “feminism” was getting a lot of attention in the wake of the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday.

“'Feminism' is our #3 lookup right now. It's been trending all day,” the company wrote.

After someone asked on Twitter why the company is pointing out its No. 3 lookup, and not its No. 1 lookup, Merriam-Webster had a ready comeback:

"Our #1 lookup is 'fascism', which has been trending consistently for the past few months. We report trends when they're new."

