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Word of the Year is "w00t"

Techtree News Staff, Dec 13, 2007 1706 hrs IST

"w00t", which has two zeros in it, reflects a new direction in the American language, said Merriam Webster in a statement.

"w00t", a word coined by- and used by- online gamers to express joy and triumph, has won pride of place as 'word of the year', as per US dictionary, Merriam-Webster. "w00t", which has two zeros in it, reflects a new direction in the American language, said Merriam Webster in a statement. The dictionary explained this is a new direction -- led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging. It's like saying 'yay', and can be either after a triumph, or for no particular reason at all. How did Merriam-Webster zero-in on "w00t"? Apparently, those who visited its Web site were each asked to vote for one among 20 words and phrases, again culled from a cluster of frequently looked-up words on the site. After "w00t" comes 'facebook', used as a Verb (not Noun), which means to add someone to a list of friends on the popular social networking Web site, Facebook.com. John Morse, president of Merriam-Webster, gave a unique explanation. He said "w00t" reflects the growing use of numeric keypads to type-in words. People tend to look for obvious numeric substitutes for alphabets; namely, 0 for O, 3 for E, 7 for T, and 4 for A. As to the origin of the word "w00t", there are different explanations. One of the Web sites said, the word seems to derive from 'whoot', an obsolete word -- meaning to shout or laugh loudly. Others say "w00t" is nothing but the sound gamers make whilst jumping bunnies -- like in the popular video game, Quake III. Meanwhile, in a separate survey of commonly-used words on the Internet conducted by California-based Global Language Monitor, the word 'hybrid' won top honors as 'word of the year', while the phrase 'climate change' won 'phrase of the year'. The second most frequently used word according to this survey is 'surge', followed by 'Bluetooth' at third place. More: 'Podcast' is Word of the Year