Time does not prepare or publish a formal list of nominees; instead, its editors make the selection privately after reporting by the staff.

The choice is supposed to remain a secret until Dec. 18, when it will be disclosed on the magazine's Web site, but it does become a parlor game in America to ponder who fits the criteria as "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse."

Mother Nature -- encompassing natural disasters from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake -- evokes issues ranging from presidential politics to race to oil to infrastructure and leadership, said NBC news anchor Brian Williams, one of the panelists gathered to debate the annual selection.

"It has laid bare so many cracks and fissures in our system," he said.

Other suggestions included so-called first responders to emergencies; Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of military relief operations after Katrina; Jordanian-born Abu Musab al Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq; U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates for the money he has donated to fight malaria; Pope Benedict; and J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books.

The person of the year is not always a person. Time selected "The American Soldier" in 2003, the "Endangered Earth" in 1988 and "The 25 and Under Generation" in 1966.

The tradition grew out of an editorial embarrassment in 1927 when Time failed to put pilot Charles Lindbergh on its cover after his historic solo trans-Atlantic flight. At the end of that year, the editors decided to make him man of the year to remedy the oversight, Time said.

Some selections have been notoriously unpopular with Time readers, such as Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1942 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.