Article snippet: The day White House counselor MORE, Merriam-Webster, the classic dictionary company, tracked a spike in users turning to its website to look up the definition of the word “fact.” “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality,” Merriam-Webster’s official Twitter account shared. “*whispers into the void* In contemporary use, fact is understood to refer to something with actual existence,” it continued. The tweets garnered tens of thousands of likes and retweets, with Twitter users surprised that, of all places, shade was being thrown by a nearly 200-year-old dictionary. Highlighting search trends is nothing new for Merriam-Webster’s online team, according to Lisa Schneider, the company’s chief digital officer and publisher. The dictionary has published “Trend Watch” articles online dating back to search spikes in 2010, tracking when people flock to the internet to look up a word at the same time. “We can see suddenly that everybody’s looking up the word ‘the,’ for example. And so since people kind of don’t look up the word ‘the’ very often, that stands out to us, and we can see that probably something happened on the national stage, an event or a headline, that enough people saw that raised the question of meaning and sent people to the dictionary,” Schneider said. She added that their trending words have always come from a variety of sources, ranging from professional athletes to new songs and other pop culture moments. But under the T... Link to the full article to read more