The word app — as in “I just downloaded this wicked cool lightsaber app for my phone!” — was voted 2010′s Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh on 7 January 2011. App beat out Wikileaks (the non-profit journalism website), trend (as a verb meaning “to exhibit online buzz”), junk (used as both a catch-all pejorative and as a euphemism for genitals), and nom (Cookie Monster’s and the LOLCats’ word for “eating” or “food”).
Other category winners at the 2010 Word of the Year vote include:
Most Useful — nom
Most Creative — prehab (preemptive enrollment in a rehab center)
Most Unnecessary — refudiate (Sarah Palin’s blend of refute and repudiate)
Most Outrageous — gate rape (invasive airport security pat-downs)
Most Euphemistic — kinetic event (a Pentagon term for violent attacks on troops)
Most Likely to Succeed — trend
Least Likely to Succeed — culturomics (see the explanation, here)
You can read the full press release from the American Dialect Society as a PDF, .
eNewsletter