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W00t! I'm The Word Of The Year! Merriam-Webster Is Totally l337!
from the m3rr14m-w3b$73r dept
Back in 2001, the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary caused a little stir with they added Homer Simpson's "Doh!" to their dictionary of the English language. Merriam-Webster has upped the ante now by not only adding "w00t" to the dictionary, but choosing it as the 2007 word of the year. Last year, "truthiness" beat out "google" for the honor. When asked about the numerical characters in word, Merriam-Webster John Webster explained that this "is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character." Um, more efficient? Hardly -- w00t is from leet speak, and the orthographic substitutions of numbers for certain letters are intended to make more secure, yet easily remembered words for passwords. Is Merriam-Webster grasping for attention? With traffic on sites like urban dictionary catching up to Merriam-Webster, perhaps they wanted to curry favor with all of the l33t kids.
