Word of The Year - American Dialect Society (U.S.)

American Dialect Society (U.S.)

Since 1991, the American Dialect Society (ADS) has designated one or more words or terms to be the "Word of the Year" in the United States.

This is in addition to its "Word of the 1990s" (web), "Word of the 20th Century" (jazz), "Word of the Past Millennium" (she), and "Word of the Decade (2000-2009)" (google as a verb). The society also selects words in other categories that vary from year to year, such as most original, most unnecessary, most outrageous and most likely to succeed.

A number of words chosen by the ADS are also on the lists of Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year and the Global Language Monitor.

  • 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" or "e-commerce")
  • 1999: Y2K
  • 2000: chad (from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida)
  • 2001: 9-11
  • 2002: weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
  • 2003: metrosexual
  • 2004: red state, blue state, purple state (from the United States presidential election, 2004)
  • 2005: truthiness (popularized on The Colbert Report)
  • 2006: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)
  • 2007: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)
  • 2008: 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.)
  • 2009: tweet (noun, a short, timely message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message)
  • 2010: app (noun, an abbreviated form of application, a software program for a computer or phone operating system)
  • 2011: occupy (verb or noun inspired from the Occupy movements of 2011)

Read more about this topic:  Word Of The Year

Famous quotes containing the words american, dialect and/or society:

    “The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”
    —Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    “The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”
    —Daniel Patrick Moynihan (20th century)