Oxford Dictionaries gave us toxic. For the Collins, it was single-use. The American Dialect Society chose tender-age shelter. It's word of the year season, and the Australian votes are in.

Macquarie Dictionary, one of two Australian lexicographical entities to pick a word of the year, has revealed its overall choice for 2018's word of the year: me too, in its expanded noun and adjectival senses.

The dictionary's word of the year panel also gave honourable mentions to deepfake (a computer-generated video of an individual, typically created without consent for malicious purposes) and big dick energy (a noun denoting a highly specific sense of self-confidence).

The choice of me too was "fairly straightforward", executive editor Alison Moore said. While she stresses the phrase isn't, in itself, all that new — civil rights activist Tarana Burke incorporated it in workshops for sexual assault survivors in the mid-2000s — its shift from a noun sense (One year of #MeToo) to adjectival and verb senses (I'm kind of just waiting for Eminem to get me tooed) is.

"In 2018, [me too] started to spread its linguistic wings beyond the hashtag," Moore said. "It answered an obvious need in the discourse surrounding this social upheaval."

Digital uncertainty a hallmark of the year's words

If a theme emerges from the 75-odd words in the Macquarie's longlist for word of the year, it is one of a deep apprehension with sorting the real from the unreal in the digital world. Sometimes literally: deepfakes use sophisticated machine learning to credibly map source images to video output, resulting in credible substitutions. Even a few years ago, such technology would have been limited to CGI set-pieces in major studios movies. Today, any Redditor can use it to make revenge porn.

"Dark kitchens" are commercial cookhouses that produce meals solely to fill orders placed through a smartphone app, delivered by a "partner". ( Reuters: Neil Hall )

But uncertainty around discerning the real from the unreal needn't be so high-tech: Poe's Law, a construction coined by analogy from the laws dictating classical mechanics, refers simply to the idea that, without a clear indicator, it is impossible to tell whether an extreme viewpoint is satire or genuinely held. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog — they're also not sure if you really think vaccines cause autism.

Even something as mundane as the food we eat is not safe from existential malaise. In dark kitchens, another on this year's longlist, commercial cookhouses produce meals solely to fill orders placed through a smartphone app, which are then delivered by a "partner". They have no attendant restaurant, no shopfront you can visit to dine in.

In their app-based avatars, though, dark kitchens boast all the iconography of a traditional bricks-and-mortar space: meticulously plated meals, cutlery, tablecloths, matching drinks, soft light. The marketing, too, stresses the real: in late 2017, Uber Eats debuted an ad campaign where a host of celebrities proudly announced their dinner plans. "Tonight, I'll be eating chick magnet pizza," boasted the actor who plays "Toadfish" Rebecchi on Neighbours. But would he, really? And would it matter if he didn't?

Honourable mentions to single-use, big dick energy

"Big dick energy", coined after the death of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, refers to an air of self-confidence unaccompanied by conceit or arrogance. ( Facebook: Anthony Bourdain )

It wasn't all bad news about technology in the Macquarie longlist. Two of the other honourable mentions made by the panel, single-use and big dick energy, were almost uplifting.

Single-use, whose adjectival sense flared up in the wake of the great Supermarket Duopoly Plastic Bag Ban of 2018, was judged by the committee as an example of a rare environmental success story. The decision by major supermarkets to phase out single-use plastic bags in favour of reusable bags, while controversial at the time, did eventually lead to 1.5 billion fewer plastic bags out in the world, a reduction of 80 per cent.

"The ABC's War on Waste also ensured we feel a level of guilt if we don't present our barista with a keep cup," Moore added.

While the Macquarie isn't the only dictionary to flirt with giving big dick energy the top gong (Oxford Dictionaries also named it in their shortlist), it may be the lexicographic body most unashamed to put it front and centre. Coined after the death of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, big dick energy refers to an air of self-confidence unaccompanied by conceit or arrogance, and is supposedly the preserve of the well endowed. The Macquarie committee liked how it seemed to encapsulate the life cycle of a meme: from meteoric rise (it was quickly featured on t-shirts) to catastrophic fall (the term was later decried for charges of phallocentrism).

They also liked its adaptability. "A woman is just as likely to have BDE as a man," Moore said. She noted the phrase had served as a scaffold for other constructions: big chick energy, big cow energy.

Can it be 'word of the year' if it contains two words?

Sorry, this video has expired When milkshake duck was chosen as the Macquarie's word for 2017, many complained that it couldn't correctly be called a "word" as it was two.

About this time last year, when milkshake duck was chosen as the Macquarie's word for 2017, many complained that it couldn't correctly be called a "word" of the year, because it was, properly speaking, two words.

At the time I called these concerns boringly regular, in large part because they are. While I am always happy to hear that people have successfully mastered counting, I find such a response misses the language forest for the pedantry trees.

At the heart of the issue are competing definitions of what exactly a "word" is. For most speakers, a word boils down to "a sequence of letters bound by space on both sides": ice is one word, cream is one word, ice cream is two words. For lexicographers, though, this definition doesn't really satisfy: many dictionary entries contain more than one orthographic word.

In some cases, a dictionary entry may even be less than one orthographic word (as in certain productive suffixes, such as -gate). Is not a more meaningful distinction of "wordiness" linked to conceptual form, or part of speech?

Latin was written in scripto continua until waning years of the first millennium AD. Did Latin only have "one word"?

How word of the year is chosen

Unlike some other word of the year decisions, the Macquarie's committee limits itself to new words or senses added to the dictionary in a given calendar year.

Dictionary lexicographers assemble a longlist from the year's thousand-odd new senses, dividing it into a dozen or so categories. Individual winners for each category are chosen on the basis of coinage, meaning, and how well they capture the spirit of the year.

Don't like this word of the year? That's fine by me, and I encourage you to pick a better one: the Macquarie's full longlist is available on their website, along with links for the People's Choice award, a category that, in the grand democratic tradition, is voted by you.

Tiger Webb is a researcher with ABC Language, and for some unknown reason is also a member of the Macquarie's word of the year panel.