Social-networking-made-up words are giving a hard time to all the technical words that comes out every year in the run for WOTY or “Word Of The Year” title. Every new technology brings along a lot of new words with it. Meanwhile made-up words used on social-networking site are also on the rise with millions of people online on different social-networking sites day in and day out.
Our own, constantly used, word on Facebook and other social-networking sites “Unfriend” has been declared as the WOTY. Word of the year guys! Don’t you think its cool? Now, we can all use the word with confidence even if our word checker shows a scary red line under it.
Unfriend: (verb) “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on social-networking site such as Facebook.”
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight,” illustrates the Oxford University Press blog.
“(Unfriend) has both currency and potential longevity,” Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s U.S. dictionary program, said in the NOAD blog. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.”
So, our word “unfriend” will be entering into the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 edition. Some of the other tech-savvy words going along with the WOTY are:
Hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets
Intexticate – distracted because of texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle
Netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory
Paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site that is only available to paying subscribers
Sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone
In recent years, social-networking words like “Twitter” and “Facebook” has also enter the dictionary.
