Manifest is an old, formal word that a lot of people now use as a wish.

It has been in English since the late 14th century, meaning clear or evident. It came from Old French and Latin manifestus, which is often explained as "caught by hand", though the second half of the word is uncertain. Shakespeare used it, the King James Bible used it, and customs officers still check a ship's manifest. The 2024 sense, according to coverage of Cambridge's announcement, was first recorded in the early 20th century in connection with Spiritualism. It means trying to bring something about by picturing it clearly or saying it repeatedly.

Cambridge Dictionary named manifest its Word of the Year for 2024. It defined the new sense as using methods such as visualisation and affirmation to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that this makes it more likely to happen. Its reasons were lookups and spread. The word was searched almost 130,000 times on the Cambridge site that year. Cambridge's publishing manager said its use had widened across all types of media, and that it showed how a word's meanings change over time. Much of the attention came from celebrities: the singer Dua Lipa spoke of manifesting her Glastonbury headline slot, and Simone Biles was credited with visualising her gymnastics success.

Naming a Word of the Year records what people were looking up. It doesn't endorse the practice. A Cambridge social psychologist, Sander van der Linden, said in coverage of the announcement that manifesting is what psychologists call magical thinking. He drew a firm line between research-backed positive thinking, self-affirmation and goal-setting, and the idea of moving reality with your mind, which he called pseudoscience. There is no evidence that thoughts alone change outside events.

That leaves the ordinary part, which is the one with research behind it, according to the same psychologist: positive thinking, self-affirmation and setting goals. Whatever those achieve, they achieve through what people then do.