Wednesday, 27th December 2006

Lists and Rankings: Truthiness and Google Top Two Words on Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2006 List

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2006 is "truthiness." Of interest to the search community, the #2 word on the Words of the Year list is Google. The list was determined by votes on the M-W.com web site.

From the M-W site:

Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show's host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

Other words making the M-W Top Ten:
3) decider
4) war
5) insurgent
6) terrorism
7) vendetta
8) sectarian
9) quagmire
10) corruption

See Also: In 2006, Google (as a verb) became an entry in both in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition and the Oxford English Dictionary.

See Also: Do you "Google?" (via the Google Blog) and You Do and/or May, In Fact, “Ask” (or “ask”) (via Ask.com Blog)

See Also: Truthiness Voted 2005 Word of the Year by American Dialect Society (PDF; 220 KB)

Category:

• Source File (ResourceShelf)

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