Words of The Year
| Year | Word | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | bushlips | (similar to "bullshit" – stemming from President George H. W. Bush's 1988 "Read my lips: no new taxes" broken promise) |
| 1991 | The 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). |
| 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 | 9-11 | |
| 2002 | weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) | |
| 2003 | metrosexual | |
| 2004 | red state, blue state, purple state | (from the 2004 presidential election). |
| 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 | (a rescue by government of a failing corporation) |
| 2009 | tweet | (a short message sent via the Twitter service) |
| 2010 | app | |
| 2011 | occupy | (in reference to the Occupy movement) |
Read more about this topic: American Dialect Society
Famous quotes containing the words words of the, words of, words and/or year:
“Let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 1:5-6.
“Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“It’s enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it’s good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)