Every year, Merriam-Webster opens its online ballot box for people to cast their word-of-the-year votes. Last year’s winner was “truthiness,” this year, it’s “w00t!,” which won handily, giving it a place in Merriam-Webster’s online Open Dictionary. Time will tell if it’ll make its way into the regular Merriam-Webster dictionary which adds new words based on usage.
1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay.” woot! in use: w00t! I won the contest!
Origins (according to Merriam-Webster): This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (”leet,” or “elite”) speak-an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double “o” in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for ‘we owned the other team’ — again stemming from the gaming community.
Other candidates for this year’s word of the year: facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom.