What's your word of the year for 2013?

The WOTY fever is starting again. Are we ready for the new Word Of The Year competition? I'm afraid that the Word Of The Year 2013 will be "Twerk" but I definitely prefer "Selfie".

Update - 11 November 2013: Fail, deficit, deadlock, stalemate - 2013’s most used words on the web.

The Global Language Monitor claims ‘404’ - internet code for an online error - as the top word, ‘toxic politics’ the top phrase and Pope Francis the top name in its annual global survey of the English language.

The rankings are based on how many times words, phrases and names were used online throughout the 1.8bn people in the English-speaking world across the last 12 months.

To qualify, the words must have been used at least 25.000 times across all types of media.

19 November 2013 - And the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is ‘selfie'! So, when I wrote this post my gut feeling gave me the right response! I'm a good Word detective..

4 December 2013: Merriam-Webster just announced that “science” had seen the greatest increase in lookups this year.

16 December 2013: Geek has been deemed the word of the year by the Collinsonline dictionary. Geek was chosen as a reminder of how an insult can be transformed into a badge of honour, according to Collins.



Sources: 

• blog.oxforddictionaries
• Global Language Monitor
• Merriam Webster
• Collins online dictionary

Top words of 2010

At this time last year, you might not have known what a spillcam or a vuvuzela was. But you probably do now. The two phrases are among the Top Words of 2010, according to the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes trends in word usage with an emphasis on global English.

"Our top words this year come from an environmental disaster, the World Cup, political malapropisms, new senses to ancient words, a booming economic colossus and a heroic rescue that captivated the world for days on end," said Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor. "This is fitting for a relentlessly growing global language that is being taken up by thousands of new speakers each and every day." The Monitor tracks the frequency of words and phrases in social media, on the Internet and in global print and electronic media and accesses proprietary databases, according to its website.

"Spillcam": rose to prominence after an underwater camera captured images of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico after a well ruptured. 

"Vuvuzelas": gained fame -- or infamy -- after the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, during which fans blared the loud, brightly colored horns.

Other top words include:

"Refudiate": a conflation of "refute" and "repudiate" used by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin; "guido" and "guidette," terms heard on the TV show Jersey Shore; 

"Snowmagedon," a hybrid of "snow" and "Armageddon" that was used to describe record snowfalls in the United States' east coast and northern Europe last winter, according to the Monitor.

"Tea Party," the grassroots conservative movement that gained momentum leading up to 2010's midterm elections, made the list of Top Phrases of 2010.

What do top English words tell?

Ten years ago, no one had heard of “H1N1″, “Web 2.0″, “n00b”, or talked about “de-friending” someone on “Twitter” or “Facebook”.

Now these are part of people’s everyday vocabulary.The world is changing. Inevitably, so are our words.The English language is going through an explosion of word creation. New words are coined – some, like “n00b”, may not even look like words; old words take on new meanings – “twitter” today bears little relation to the Middle English twiteren. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), in 2009 the English language tipped the scales with a vocabulary of one million words. Not good news for the 250 million people acquiring English in China.

GLM, the San Diego-based language watcher, publishes annual lists of top words and phrases by tracking words in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, blogs, and social media such as Twitter and YouTube.

Each year’s list reflects major concerns and changes taking place that year. For instance, from the 2009 list, we have to acknowledge the fact that technology is reshaping our ways of living (twitter, web 2.0).We need to face up to the after-effects of a “financial tsunami” (stimulus, foreclosure), a pandemic (H1N1), the death of revered pop icon (MJ, King of Pop) and the debates over “healthcare reform” and “climate change” that mark the year.A quick rundown of GLM’s top words/phrases of the decade is precisely like watching clips of a documentary of the decade. From the lists we are reminded of the series of world-shaping events from 9/11(2001), tsunami (2004) to H1N1 (2009), and we see the huge impact the Internet and new technologies have made on our lives, from the burst of the “dot.com bubble” (2000) to blog (2003), Google (2007) and Twitter (2009), which represent a new trend in social interaction.The lists are also witnesses of the influences of entertainment sector such as the film “Brokeback” (2004) a new term for gay to “Vampire” (2009), now a symbol of unrequited love. Michael Phelps’s 8-gold-medal accomplishments at the Beijing Olympics had created a Phelpsian (2008) pheat.

yes but.. what does N00b mean?

N00b: a derogatory term to define either a new user to a game/forum or someone who acts stupidly regardless of account age or time played.. not be confused with "newbie" 
a person who is just new to a game, concept, or forum.


Sources: Global Language Monitor, Urban Dictionary