Friday, June 12, 2009

The millionth word in English is... Web 2.0.

And yet they continue to ignore "Goldblumin' " (1. adj. Unbearably awesome. 2. verb Fornicating with an attractive person.)
The English-language's millionth word, spewed out of a computer in Texas yesterday, and it's downright geeky: Web 2.0.

Runners-up include "jai ho," a Hindi phrase indicating the joy of victory, popularized in the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire, and n00b, a put-down in gamers' lingo for a newcomer. Yes, those are zeros in the word.

With a worldwide network of computers scanning billions of web pages, the Global Language Monitor media analytics firm has been counting and tracking English words for six years, measuring a word's use and geographic distribution. To be deemed a word, trackers have to find it at least 25,000 times.

Among the other runners-up:

Cloud computing – technical jargon for the Internet.
Carbon neutral – relating to an effort to stem climate change.
Sexting – sending email or text messages with sexual content.
From here.

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