LISBON, Jan. 5 (Xinhua) -- "Nurse" has been voted Word of the Year 2018 in Portugal, the publishing house Porto Editora that promotes the initiative announced on Saturday.
A record 226,000 votes were received with "nurse" garnering 37.8 percent support and "teacher" in second place with 33.4 percent of the votes.
Porto Editora revealed a 10-word shortlist on Dec. 1 lase year and invited the Portuguese public to vote online throughout the month. Nominations were based on surveys of word use during the year and words searched for in the publisher's online dictionaries.
The full list was: harassment, nurse, speculation, extremism, arsenal, populism, privacy, teacher, sexism, talpidae.
Paulo Rebelo Goncalves, head of Porto Editora, described the participation as "truly historical" compared to 30,000 votes the previous year. "The exceptional level of participation demonstrates that this initiative is definitively consolidated in the calendar of the Portuguese," he said.
"The choice of the Portuguese may reflect a strong concern regarding the situation involving the nurse class, something that could be extended to the teachers, given the high votes that the word recorded," he added.
"Whether through the chosen words or the words that made the list, we looked at them and realized what happened that year, and why they chose that word," he explained.
The initiative started in 2009 and has lasted for a decade. "Wildfire" was voted the Word of Year in 2017 as a series of forest fires raged through Portugal, destroying hundreds of hectares and causing more than 100 fatalities in June and October.
