'Irregardless' is not a word

What actually happened

The 2020 flare-up came when Merriam-Webster stated on social media that it is a word, and the internet reacted as though a crime had occurred. The entry had been sitting there for 86 years. "Is it a word" and "should you use it" are different questions, and dictionaries answer the first while the label answers the second.

The technical objection is that the ir- prefix and the -less suffix both negate, so the word appears to cancel itself. English does not actually work that way in practice: this is emphatic negation, the same instinct behind "unloosen," "debone," and "unthaw," all of which mean what their apparently-redundant versions mean. Nobody thinks unloosening a knot tightens it.

Merriam-Webster's own usage note is blunt: it is nonstandard, people will judge you, use 'regardless'. That advice is unchanged. What changed is the claim schools made, which was that the string of letters was not a word at all. It is a word with a 200-year record and a warning label, and the difference matters if you care about being precise, which is presumably why you objected to it in the first place.