w00t Named “Word of the Year” for 2007
Dictionary company Merriam-Webster has named w00t their 2007 Word of the Year. According to the site, w00t was submitted for consideration way back in 2005 by “Kat from Massachusetts” with the following definition:
- w00t
-
interjection
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”“w00t! I won the contest!”
Visitors to m-w.com finally voted it into the top spot for this year’s competition. You’ve come a long way, w00t.
In other w00t-related news, Grant Barrett — editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary of fringe English — has written another amusingly formal exploration of the word’s origins. This one is far longer and more detailed than the one I linked to in 2004.
Somewhat surprisingly, Barrett traces the word’s history to hip-hop music instead of online gaming and “leet speak.” I think his argument is weakened, however, by the claim that “whoot and w00t are, for our purposes, variations of the same lexical item.”
As they say on the internets, O RLY?
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