WingColors

The word of the year is a word that's not in their dictionary.

The word you've selected hasn't found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it's now been awarded—might just improve its chances.

Makes total sense to me. o_O

Woot! It's a great online store. I was going to start a company called woot wear a few years ago.

I use it as a silly term. Which it is. I am amused by this. LOL

I disliked this word when it wasn't a word, and now that it is almost a word I dislike it more.

Who uses this anymore?

Words voted for as word of the year are not there because of their usage, or lack thereof. The list is devised based on the most commonly looked-up words — discounting swear words and commonly confused words (affect/effect). Its usage is only a tangential factor, in that widespread usage is likely to affect voting patterns for it.

And whether its commonly used in your, or anyone else's, social circles is besides the point. It is commonly used. A simple search of Technorati shows over 7,000 uses in the blogosphere (though I'm not sure what its time cut-off is) — only ~400 of which appear to discuss its WotY award. And over 2 million uses in the last year on Google Blog Search — from which only ~2,000 occurred in the last week. And I would imagine that its use on blogs accounts for only a minor percentage of its total use. I wish I had access to a corpus of spoken words, because I would bet money on the fact that its usage in speech is also very much on the rise.

That said, I think the emergence of "web words" in the yearly M-W lists is interesting. w00t and facebook (as a verb) this year, google (also verb) last year, and blog back in 2004. I don't necessarily think they're deserving — quixotic was my favourite on this year's list — but it says something about modern society.

Woot, Rich! Quixotic is such a fabulous word, and even more fabulous if it gets anyone to pick up Edith Grossman's wonderful translation of Don Quixote and actually read it.

I had no idea "woot" had anything to do with owning anything or anyone. Around here, it just means yippee. Only sillier than that.

Woot! Now that it's an official word, imagine the variations we can use:

"She was all wootly after she won America's Next Top Model." or
"We had a turduken for dinner and it filled me with wootness."