MeToo has received its fair recognition from Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary, becoming its word of the year.

That dictionary defines it as an adjective, describing a relation of or to “the Me Too movement … [or] an accusation of sexual harassment or sexual assault”. It also has a meaning as a verb – the action of accusing “(someone) of having committed sexual harassment or sexual assault” – as in, “he has been MeTooed”.

Although the term now denotes a movement, it was conceived in 2006 as “a kind of bat signal between survivors of sexual violence” by Tarana Burke, who used it as the name of an activist group.

Twelve years from Burke’s inception – and 10 days after the New York Times exposed the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017 – actor Alyssa Milano tweeted it as a hashtag, rousing survivors to out themselves in solidarity. In the weeks that followed, it was tweeted more than 12m times.

I sent one of those 12m tweets, writing at the time how those simple words spoke to this sudden, Twitter-facilitated experience of “collective deshaming”.

What I recognise in the 18 months since is that the power of that revelation, and the visibility of the uprising, lay not just in the sense of shared relief. It also affirmed to me my right to individual validation.

As a word, MeToo speaks to both sentiments. English rarely creates new words of its component parts – mashing a personal pronoun (me) into an adverb (too), a word that describes active commonality. As a word, it renders the individual indivisible from their shared experience.

For survivors, appreciation of this conjunction has been visceral. After the Weinstein accusations, in a phone conversation with a colleague – who at the time I barely knew – devolved to a mutual series of repetitions of the phrase: me too, me too, me too … Less words than a chorus of earned and brutal yawps.

The Macquarie panellists concur it’s a word infused with a rare emotional power. For new words to enter the dictionary is often a long journey. Habitually, dictionary word-watchers observe this slow passage of neologisms from the smaller rooms of discourse – chatrooms, journals, subcultures, teenagers on buses – into speech; it’s only by charting use and aggregating frequency through which lexicographers become convinced a new word will endure.

Not so with MeToo, whose viral spread from Milano’s tweets achieved rapid transition from hashtag to encyclopaedic record to dictionary with alacrity.

Words enter languages because there is an imperative to name something that has made itself distinct, and the intensity of MeToo’s uptake suggests just how desperately this word was needed; that there is a specific sorority within surviving sexual misconduct that the world has finally been obliged to describe.

What’s more, the onset of consequences from the revelations are unprecedented. Even in Australia, where strict defamation laws transform those accused of misconduct into plaintiffs, we have arrived on a fresh country of explicit complaint. To prevent suits, bad press or trouble, employers are scrambling for workplace safeguards: rehearsal rooms and film sets, for instance, are employing intimacy coordinators, lest “he got metooed” is said of the sudden disappearance of an inappropriately behaving, former employee.

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“I can’t see it stopping any time soon,” Victoria Morgan, word-of-the-year judge and senior editor of the Macquarie, told me. It should give all women confidence that a revolution is upon us, even if its future is unclear. “It was so overwhelming when we looked at it to the others in comparison.”

There is grim amusement, also, in the discovery that MeToo’s word of the year competitors included the patriarchal “incel”, which describes the woman-hating, “involuntary celibates” of the Manosphere, as well as the frightful “Big Dick Energy” – which, alas, demands no explanation.

“Incel was a strong contender, but Metoo was overwhelming,” Morgan said. “When people take it upon themselves to bring [a new term] into language, it really highlights how great the need for it in language is. The committee was unified behind the decision,” Morgan said.

“It has become an identifier.”

There are millions of us – already – who know precisely what it means.