English has gotten many of its words from other countries over the years, and has given many people around the globe a common language for communication, especially in the news, business, and technology industries. The company called Global Language Monitor uses technology to analyze the news and business information on the internet to track various trends for marketing purposes. As a part of this process, they keep a list of words that appear most often in these materials. The word they’ve identified as the most used and most influential for 2011 is occupy.

If you’ve been following the news, you can’t have avoided seeing at least one story about the “Occupy [insert place name here]” movement that has been bringing people together to protest the inequality of wealth in specific communities or countries, and around the world. The 2011 Arab Spring and other revolutions and protests involved large groups of people occupying specific areas of a city, and the problems in the “Occupied Territories” of Palestine create a regional and global issue that is yet to be resolved. It’s no wonder this word made it to the top of the list.

The verb occupy comes from the Latin word occupare (“take over, possess”). There are several common uses for the word, as illustrated by these example sentences:

Example 1: The northern regions of France were occupied by Germany during World War II while parts of the south remained relatively free.

Example 2: The large painting by Monet occupies the whole of the far wall of the entrance to the museum.

Example 3: This new project will occupy all of my time until March.

In the first example, the meaning is “take over and hold by force against opposition.” In the second, the word expresses “to take up all available space” while in the third example, occupy means “to fill up time.”

Occupy yourself with looking for repeated or common words in the newspaper articles you read, and you’ll discover new English words every day.

Another word on GLM’s list is the German word Kummerspeck, or “grief bacon,” referring to the practice of using food to provide comfort that leads to a gain in weight. We just thought that was interesting.