‘Google’ named word of the decade, ‘Tweet’ named word of the year

The American Dialect Society has been choosing a Word of The Year since 1990, and sees it as important as Time magazine’s Person of The Year award. Its latest award saw technology the big winner, with ‘Tweet’ named the Word of The Year for 2009 and ‘Google’ as in ‘to Google’ named Word of The Decade.

As someone who deals in words for a job – sometimes well, sometimes quite badly – I find words and language and the effect they have on the world truly fascinating. Every year throws up new words and phrases that seemingly emerge from nowhere to become part of our everyday language. And technology, due to its speed of progress, is responsible for a fair share of these.

ADS named ‘Tweet’ its Word of The Year for 2009, beating out the likes of ‘Fail’, ‘Public option’, ‘H1N1′, ‘Death panel’, and ‘Sexting’.

‘Fail’ and ‘Sexting’ are words that have been overused during the past 12 months and are likely to die a quick death. However, ‘Tweet’ has been absolutely everywhere, even though some of the people using the word don’t quite understand what it means. And it’s likely to be with us for some time to come, although the novelty of using the word (and possibly Twitter itself) could wear off before long.

ADS named Google (the verb rather than the noun) its Word of The Decade for the noughties, beating out the likes of ’9/11′, ‘green’, ‘blog’, ‘text’, and ‘war on terror’.

In many ways, sad though it is, ’9/11′ and ‘war on terror’ were the defining terms of the decade we’ve just left. While, ‘green’, ‘blog’, and ‘text’ are all relatively new terms which became mainstream in the noughties. I’d agree that ‘to Google’ deserves the accolade though, as it’s a company name which has traversed its origins and come to mean any form of searching the Web, even if Google isn’t the search engine or site being used to do so.

It was a double win for Twitter as November saw The Global Language Monitor declare ‘Twitter’ the most used word in the English language during 2009.

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• Web 2.0 named one millionth English word – as its popular usage dies
• Twitter declared top English word of 2009
• New York Times bans “Tweet”
• Twitter fails to trademark “tweet” – app developers celebrate
• More people now Google themselves to manage online reputations