Why does a word you just learned suddenly show up everywhere?

Every day we pass countless words and objects, but we let most of them slip by without noticing. That is because the brain cannot process everything, so it picks out and focuses only on what matters to us right now.

When you learn a new word, it goes onto the list of "things that matter." Then the word catches your eye even in situations you would have simply passed by before. The word has not become more common. The number of times you notice it has gone up.

Once you feel that "this word is showing up a lot lately," scenes that fit that thought tend to stay in your memory. You do not separately count the many articles and conversations where the word never came up. Even if you heard it only once out of ten times, that one time stays vivid.

Zwicky explained that this illusion comes from two things overlapping. One is selective attention, seeing only what stands out to you. The other is confirmation bias, collecting only the examples that support your idea and letting the opposite examples slip away.

The story that after buying a yellow car you suddenly seem to see many more yellow cars on the road is the same phenomenon. A pregnant person feeling that they often run into pregnant people on the street is another common example. The number of yellow cars on the road is the same, but your eyes go to them first because they match your car.

This phenomenon is also known by the nickname "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon." The name came from a 1994 post on a newspaper message board in St. Paul in the United States, where a reader wrote about hearing the name of a German militant group twice in one day.

Knowing about this illusion lets you question a feeling like "everyone uses this word these days" one more time. Whether you just learned it recently or it has really increased has to be checked with numbers that were actually counted, such as search records or statistics.

Even when it feels like a strange coincidence, most of the time it is the result of a change in your attention. The next time a new word keeps showing up, you can take it as a sign that your brain has learned that word well.