The American Dialect Society (ADS) has namedgoogle – the verb – as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to “search the Internet”) won out over blog, which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS’s New Word Committee, “just sounds ugly.” Tweet was named the top word of the year for 2009. Fail – “a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful” – was 2009’s most useful word.
Definitions:
- Tweet: noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message.
- Google: Verb meaning “to search the Internet.” Generic form of the trademarked “Google,” the world’s dominant Internet search engine.
- Fail: A noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful. Usually written as “FAIL!”
The ADS’s members include linguists, grammarians, etymologists, writers, editors and university students. The ADS was founded in 1889.
Twitter and other social networks have clearly captured the imagination of many language societies. Twitter was the top word of in the Global Language Monitor‘s survey, and unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the year. To represent the 1990s, the ADS picked Web as the top word of the decade.
Do You Agree?
What do you think? Do you think google deserves to be the one word that represents the last decade? Or is this just another example of how Google is succeeding in its slow takeover of our culture?
