2005: Refugee

Technically, our top lookup in 2005 was integrity, which didn't seem to correlate to a specific event but more to social and political developments at large that made this word increasingly important to people. It's since joined the ranks of perennial top lookups.

The #2 lookup, refugee, spoke to the ongoing conversation about the appropriateness of this word to describe people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and at the time made this the most heavily looked-up event-related word in the history of Merriam-Webster, outdoing the previous record-holder tsunami (#6) by a wide margin.