w00t! w00t! w00t!

Meet Mirriam-Webster’s word of the year—w00t.

According to Merriam-Webster's president, John Morse, "w00t" blends whimsy and new technology. You’ll notice the middle letters aren’t letters at all—they are zeros.

Merriam-Webster describes w00t this way:

1. w00t (interjection) expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay."

W00t illustrates “a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," Morse said. He explained that gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, creating what they call "l33t speak" — that's "leet" when spoken, short for "elite" to the rest of the world.

Click here to see the Merriam-Webster top ten “words of 2007”, which includes the always familiar “apathetic” and the not so familiar “sardoodledom” which describes something I guarantee would never be found in the writing of the women of mystery or any of our blog buddies.

And now from the New York Times:

In Sunday’s edition of The Week in Review, Grant Barrett, co-host of the public radio show “A Way With Words” and a lexicographer introduces us to the buzzwords of 2007.

Barrett includes words you’ve probably noticed such as:

forever stamp n. A United States postage stamp that will cover a first-class letter regardless of future price increases.

And words that may have escaped your notice such as:

bacn n. Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like. Popularized at the PodCamp conference in Pittsburgh in August 2007.

So take a gander (how old fashioned is that?) at these sites and learn the words of 2007 because in a very few days we will start building the lexicon of 2008.

Terrie