This was the word which Macquarie Dictionary chose as its 2020 Word of the Year, giving a name to what we have all been doing over the course of the year prompted by bushfires, floods and the pandemic. We have been compulsively scrolling through the news on the latest disaster.

ZG: 6

Although this is an apt coinage and useful considering what we have been through, I am not sure of its currency.

We did not acquire the word for this activity until late in the year, taking it from American English where the suggestion is that it had been around since 2018 but achieved mainstream use when some American psychologists decided it was time to give people advice on how to stop this addictive habit. That was in the middle of the year. An American journalist made a feature of it and a few months later we were doomscrolling with the best of them.

An alternative word is doomsurfing.

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