American Dialect Society selects ‘google’ and ‘tweet’
The American Dialect Society (ADS) has chosen “google” – the verb – as its top word of this decade and “tweet” – a short message sent via the Twitter.com service or the act of sending such a message – as its top word of the year 2009.
Grant Barrett, chairman of the New Words Committee of ADS stated that both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy inquisitiveness and to broadcast to a select following, both through the Internet.He also said that he had assumed the word blog would take the position in the word of the decade category, but its also true that more people google than blog.
Google only became a verb after users of the search engine began to use it to mean search. “Google” as a verb was coined and included in the Meriam-Webster Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
The American Dialect Society(ADS) is a collection of scholars dedicated to the study of the English language and other languages and dialects in North America. They choose the Word of Year by conducting a voting session.
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