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Word of the year

Have you ever heard of this before. I am not sure whether its ideal to discuss this topic here or not but this phrase catches me a lot. Every year Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary website decides the Words of the Year based on the popularity of that word for that year and how often it comes up for that year. The word of the year is chosen by voting system where people tend to chose the words and the word that gets most vote is decided the word of the year.

Here is the list of words that got featured for word of the year till year 2008:

1990: bushlips (similar to “bullshit” – stemming from President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 “Read my lips: no new taxes” broken promise)

1991: mother of all (as in Saddam Hussein’s foretold “Mother of all battles”)

1992: Not! (meaning “just kidding”)

1993: information superhighway

1994: cyber, morph (to change form)

1995: web and (to) newt (to act aggressively as a newcomer, like Speaker Newt Gingrich during the Contract with America)

1996: mom (as in “soccer mom”)

1997: millennium bug

1998: e- (as in “e-mail”)

1999: Y2K

2000: chad (from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida)

2001[1]: 9-11

2002[2]: weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)

2003[3]: metrosexual

2004[4]: red state, blue state, purple state (from the United States presidential election, 2004)

2005[5] : truthiness (popularized on The Colbert Report)

2006[6]: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)

2007[7]: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)

2008[8]: bailout (in the specific sense of the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.)

LOL both 2007 and 2008 say recession related words as the word of the year we know we are now facing unprecedented crisis due to subprime crisis which started in US and spread to the world. World is facing tough times now and I hope 2009 will have a similar word. There are also lists for words of 20th century words of last millennium, interesting right I hope you will have your own ideas which words should be highlighted. Please share in comments your word of the year suggestions for 2009.

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