The Oxford English Dictionary has selected omnishambles as their 2012 Word of the Year, but it might not be familiar to people who don’t live in the United Kingdom. It’s a word that was created as part of a political satire show in the UK, and it means “a situation that is completely shambolic.” So what does shambolic mean? Again, if you don’t live in Britain, you might not know. The word is defined as “disorganized, mismanaged, chaotic” and relates back to the noun shambles, meaning a state of chaos. That word is probably more familiar, no matter where you live in the English-speaking world.

The editors at the American dictionary Merriam-Webster picked two words for the top of their 2012 list: socialism and capitalism. The editors said that they picked the pair of words because they were frequently looked up together, especially after some of the more publicized political discussions in the United States over the past year relating to public health. Socialism is a system of cooperative economy, focusing on shared ownership and an equitable division of resources. In capitalism, private individuals are on their own in the economy, for better or for worse.

For the staff at the Oxford American Dictionary, all the excitement of 2012 was for a word that made the transition from an acronym to a verb: GIF. You might have seen this on computer files, after a dot at the end, like .pdf or .jpg, but now the Graphical Interchange Format has gone from the end of the line to the head of the class, and “to GIF” is now a common expression. It joins other techno-verbs like “to google” and “to tweet” in our 21st-century lexicon.

What was your favorite – or least favorite – word for 2012?