Americans have chosen the word of the year

The editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (Merriam-Webster) announced on December 11th that the word “w00t” was the word of the year in 2007, an interjection that online gamers express joy with, Reuters reports.

Some sources consider “w00t” an acronym for the phrase “we owned the other team” (“we made another team”), where the Latin letters “o” are replaced with zeros. Others believe that this is a new version of the outdated word "whoot". Replacing letters with numbers is a common occurrence in the jargon inherent to gamers and computer scientists.
The word of the year was chosen by users of the Merriam-Webster site from a list of the 20 most requested expressions on the site. In the second place was the new verb “to facebook”, which is used to mean “add someone to your friend list on Facebook” or “find someone among users of social networks”.
On December 11, the results of another study of words and expressions used in the media and on the Internet were published. According to California researchers (California-based Global Language Monitor), the main word of 2007 is “hybrid”.
In previous years, various researchers have called the key terms “blog” and “podcast”.

Via www.lenta.ru