Is Green the New Black?

In our recent poll, we asked readers of AskOxford.com to decide on the word of the century so far. One of the shortlisted words was 'Footprint', representing the increasing impact environmental terminology has been having on our culture and language.

Today, phrases such as 'reduce your footprint' require no glossing - the new imperative (one which for many scientists has been expressed far too late) is to minimize the impact on our planet. 'Footprints' come in many forms: they may be carbon, green, or ecological, while we may use a footprint calculator to measure our impact on our natural resources. Eco-footprint analysis attempts to measure the human demand upon nature.

The frequency with which 'footprint' now evokes an environmental context can be measured by the Oxford Corpus. At the beginning of the 2000s, 'carbon' and 'ecological' scarcely featured on the linguistic map for 'footprint': today they are among its most frequent companions, along with the verb 'reduce'.

More environmental terms can be found in the new paperback Dictionary of Environment and Conservation.This wide-ranging reference is packed with over 8500 entries on all aspects of the environment and conservation.

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