Google Named Word of Decade. Tweet Named Word of the Year

Posted on January 11, 2010

The Washington Post reports that the word "tweet" has been named the word of the year and "Google" has been named the word of the decade by the American Dialect Society.

"I think my life has been more affected by 'Google' than '9/11,' " says a college student.
"People are currently tweeting that 'tweet' is being nominated for word of the year," observes someone else.
After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" for the Aughts.

It is good news for the two companies behind the words: Twitter and Google.

Here are the definitions for the terms from the American Dialect Society:

tweet: (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message)
"google: (a generic form of "Google," meaning "to search the Internet")