Bedroom Tax Comes Second- In Oxford Dictionaries Word Of The Year Competition
I didn’t even know it was in a dictionary!
bedroom tax, noun, informal
(in the UK) a reduction in the amount of housing benefit paid to a claimant if the property they are renting is judged to have more bedrooms than is necessary for the number of the people in the household, according to criteria set down by the government.
The Welfare Reform Act 2012 proposed various changes to the rules governing social security benefits in the UK, including an ‘under-occupancy penalty’ to be imposed on households that were receiving housing benefit and that were judged to have bedrooms surplus to their requirements. Critics and opponents soon began to refer to the new penalty as the ‘bedroom tax’, perhaps as a way of associating it with the term poll tax (a popular name for the unpopular community charge, now replaced by council tax). The first references to the bedroom tax in our corpus appear in 2011 but usage increased dramatically around the time this new provision came into force, in April 2013.
A mainstream institution is listening. This is a funny sort of progress!
Same Difference 