Don't Go Wordless

The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen 'unfriend' as its 2009 Word of the Year (WOTY). To unfriend means to remove someone from your friend list on a social network like Facebook or MySpace. Unfriend was chosen from a total of twenty-four contenders for 2009. Other technology-related words in the running for Word of the Year included:

hashtag: 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

intexticated: distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

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

paywall: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting: the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Words were also considered from the lexicons of economics (freemium), politics and current affairs (teabagger), environment (brown state) as well as novelty words like 'deleb' and 'tramp stamp.'

Besides being a popular phrase--not to mention close rival to 'defriend'--the 2009 WOTY employs an unconventional use of the 'un-' prefix. Unfriend is different, because most 'un-' prefix words are typically adjectives, while unfriend takes on a verb form, according to Lindberg. There are examples of other 'un-' verbs, such as unpack and uncap, but unfriend takes it one step further by employing an abnormal "verb sense" of the word 'friend.'