Oxford English Dictionary Announces 2009 Word of the Year – “Unfriend”

You know that social media has made a huge impact when the Oxford English Dictionary picks a word to be the word of the year that has to do with Facebook.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

This word was chosen as the word of the year because its meaning is understood in online social networking context, and considered an interesting choice since this word starts with “un-” and is different from the norm.

Some other Technology driven words that were considered for the word of the year were also:

hastag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

Other Notable Word Clusters included Twitter related “terms” such as:
Tweeps
Tweetup
Twitt
Twitterati
Twitterature
Twitterverse/sphere
Retweet
Twibe
Sweeple
Tweepish
Tweetaholic
Twittermob
Twitterhea