![]() I will bow to the data, not to my personal opinion. ![]() If and when I’m asked on a survey for the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel (I have been a member since 2005) whether impactful is acceptable in formal written usage, I will say yes. She reviews some other impactful facts and opinions, and her conclusion is clear and reasonable: Use “influential” or “effective” instead. Many people in business and education like to speak of things that have an impact as being “impactful,” but this term does not appear in most dictionaries and is not well thought of by traditionalists. The word may sound business jargony to some, but the data no longer fully support this connotation, as I’ll get to.Ĭurzan quotes the top Urban Dictionary entry for impactful: “A nonexistent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing, and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting, and beneficial to humanity than it really is.” She also links to Paul Brians' note: The meaning of impactful is a bit vague (for example, is the impact good or bad?), but the same critique could be made of well-accepted adjectives like influential. The adjective impactful is relatively new to the language, but that’s not a good reason for my distaste either-there are lots of other new words that I like (e.g., the wonderfully playful recombobulate). ![]() There are plenty of similar adjectives in the language, formed by a noun + -ful to mean “full of or having a lot of ”: for example, playful, joyful, eventful. Now, let’s be clear: There is no particularly good reason for my displeasure with this word. In other words, I notice the word, and I don’t especially like it. If I were asked to rate new words on a scale from 1-10 based on their aesthetic appeal (note: words’ aesthetic appeal in my opinion-this scale cannot possibly be objective), with 10 being the most appealing and 1 being the least, I would give impactful about a 3. Anne Curzan, " What to do about 'impactful'?", C hronicle of Higher Education, :
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