Web 2.0 named one millionth English word – as its popular usage dies

The English language is many things – beautiful, tricky to learn, popular worldwide – but it also has the most words of any language. And a new one has been officially crowned as the one millionth English word – Web 2.0 – despite the fact that most of us stopped using that term months ago. And even when we did use it, it didn’t really mean anything.

Web 2.0 is a phrase that has been with us for ten years now. Not in mainstream circles of course, with it only seeping into the general public domain a few years ago. And now it’s on its way out, with most agreeing we’re living with Web 2.0 and looking to the next evolution of the Internet.

But that fact hasn’t stopped Global Language Monitor from declaring Web 2.0 as officially the one millionth word in the English language. It was given this accolade ahead of other technology terms and words including N00b, Cloud Computing, Sexting, and Defriend, which came close but will ultimately be forgotten.

John Battelle noted the accolade on his blog today. Who is John Battelle? The man who, along with Tim O’Reilly, popularized the term by holding an annual conference with Web 2.0 in the title. Since then, the blogosphere assigned the term to everything new, organized, or social that was happening on the Internet.

Global Language Monitor decided Web 2.0 was the one millionth English word by using a complex set of algorithms which measure how often a word is used and whether or not it has crossed over into the mainstream. Or, depending on who you believe, it could have just been chosen at random to gain publicity for an obscure language group.

Whatever the truth, the fact remains that Web 2.0 has become a very stale term assigned too readily to too broad a canvas. Even Battelle and O’Reilly are sick of it, which is why this year’s Web 2.0 conference is being themed as Web Squared.

Now that it’s officially recognized, although not by most dictionaries, I think it’s safe to assume the shark has well and truly been jumped, and that we can all move on. But isn’t that the problem with most words and phrases which stem from technology? By the time they’re popular, the early adopters have moved on.

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• ‘Google’ named word of the decade, ‘Tweet’ named word of the year
• Twitter declared top English word of 2009
• Dictionaries adopt more Internet terminology into the English language
• Woot’s in a word?
• ICANN approves non-English characters for domain names