Each year the American Dialect Society names its Words of the Year in various categories.
Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.
There are other bodies which announce a Word of the Year, including the Australian version by the Macquarie Dictionary, but the American Dialect Society’s is the longest running and the only one not affiliated with a commercial interest. There is, of course, a heavy American bias in the ADS’s choice of words.
In 2009 the American Dialect Society voted “tweet” (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message) as the word of the year and “ google” (a generic form of “Google,” meaning “to search the Internet) as its word of the decade.
For the 21st awards in 2010, the categories, nominees and winners are set out below. The number after each nomination is the number of votes it received. Numbers separated by slash marks indicate a run-off. Voting totals for each category might not be identical because the number of voters might have changed for each category.
