"If a bomb goes off, you're going to be in the hurt locker. That's how they used it in Baghdad," Mark Boal told the New Yorker. "It means slightly different things to different people, but all the definitions point to the same idea. It's somewhere you don't want to be."

Although American sports writers have used the phrase for at least two decades - to refer to injured players, or a team languishing in the league - the Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded example dates from 1966, says Fiona McPherson, senior editor of the OED's new words group.

"It's from a Texas newspaper and it says 'If an army marches on its stomach, Old Charlie is in the hurt locker'. Old Charlie is the Viet Cong. It is similar to the phrases 'world of hurt' or 'world of pain'.

Tops on the Michigan university's list of useless phrases was "shovel-ready." The term refers to infrastructure projects that are ready to break ground and was popularly used to describe road, bridge and other construction projects fueled by stimulus funds from the Obama administration.

And speaking of stimulus, that word -- which was applied to government spending aimed at boosting the economy -- made the over-used category as well, along with an odd assortment of Obama-related constructions such as Obamacare and Obamanomics.

"We say Obamanough already," the LSSU committee said.

And all of its variations…tweetaholic, retweet, twitterhea, twitterature, twittersphere…

"People tweet and retweet and I just heard the word 'tweet' so many times it lost all meaning." – Ricardo, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.

Mikhail Swift of Hillman, Mich. says the tweeting is "pointless…yet has somehow managed to take the nation by storm. I'm tired of hearing about celebrity X's new tweet, and how great of a tweeter he or she is."

"I don't know a single non-celebrity who actually uses it," says Alex Thompson of Sault St. Marie, Mich.

Jay Brazier of Williamston, Mich. says she supposes that tweeters might be "twits."

"I think my life has been more affected by 'Google' than '9/11,' " says a college student.

"People are currently tweeting that 'tweet' is being nominated for word of the year," observes someone else.

After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" for the Aughts.

• tweet: (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message)
• "google: (a generic form of "Google," meaning "to search the Internet")

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."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal."

The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase. added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months. Two terms from India, Jai Ho! and slumdog finished No. 2 and 4. Jai Ho! Is a Hindi exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment; Slumdog is an impolite term for children living in the slums. Just missing the top spot was n00b, a mixture of letters and numbers that is a derisive term for newcomer. It is also the only mainstream English word that contains within itself two numerals. Rounding out the final five were another technical term, cloud computing, meaning services that are delivered via the cloud (or Internet), and a term from the Climate Change debate, carbon neutral. At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

• 1,000,000: Web 2.0 - The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
• 999,999: Jai Ho! - The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as "It is accomplished". Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, "Slumdog Millionaire". 999,998: N00b - From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
• 999,997: Slumdog - a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.

Ms. McKean's brainchild is called Wordnik, and it combines the best practices of the old-fashioned desk reference with Internet innovations. Words can be tagged like a blog entry, their pronunciation recorded and replayed like streaming radio, their related words cataloged like a list of books customers also bought at an online book depot. When the paper page gives way to the Web page, everything about the way we think of words will change, McKean says. "This project," she predicts in a quiet voice devoid of bravado, "is going to completely revolutionize all of dictionarymaking forever."

Granted, a dictionary is closer to a database than a mystery thriller, its authors nothing like, say, John Grisham. But to McKean, nothing has ever seemed more fascinating than collecting and organizing American words.

McKean was 8 years old when she decided that when she grew up, she wanted to be a lexicographer – the technical term for a writer or editor of dictionaries. She first found it in her daily scouring of The Wall Street Journal. Her father was a Journal devotee, and McKean liked the human interest stories (but, she jokes, "even then, I knew enough not to read the editorial page.") A feature article celebrated Oxford University Press's 1980 Word of the Year – ayatollah – and talked about preparing the newest edition of its most famous title, the Oxford English Dictionary.

"I think I was really attracted by the fact that it was taking 21 years to make the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary," she recalls. "I was 8. Twenty-one years was forever."

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

We don't know how much IAC is paying for Lexico, but we can be sure that it's not panhandling for the money. Barry Diller's new media giant is clearly on better financial footing than Answers is.

Lexico's websites will also fit right in. Ask.com is repositioning itself this year, by returning to the query-based searches that made the site stand out from more conventional search portals such as those from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Ask.com's retro approach will look great with Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com on its arm.

The beauty of Lexico's properties is that 88% of its traffic comes from users who simply type in one of its generic domain names. IAC won't have to pay to acquire natural traffic. Lexico's sites attracted 15.6 million monthly unique users in March, according to market watcher comScore. Traffic has grown by 29% over the past year, three times faster than the global search market.

Navigating Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary Online is effortless and a great deal of fun. 15 major themes offer a variety of engaging, browsable topics. Students can search for illustrated science topics like nuclear fission, anatomy of a frog, and plant cell. Train buffs can scroll through the rail transport section. Homeowners can follow the plumbing system or browse the do-it-yourself section. Or, users can type a term like narwhal into the easy index search box to zero in on an illustration of the marine creature with a spiraled, ten-foot tusk.

The society says it just charts words or phrases that have become prominent in a particular year, and is not telling people how to speak.

"Subprime" means literally "less than ideal" and is the technical term used to describe loans - especially mortgages - made to borrowers with poor credit histories.

A series of defaults on such loans spread panic through much of the banking sector in 2007 as financial institutions realised they had bought many of these loans from one another without knowing how risky they were.

If it sounds as though Merriam-Webster is dropping its buttoned-down image with too much talk of "smackdowns" (contests in entertainment wrestling) and "telenovelas" (Latin-American soap operas), consider it also is adding "gray literature" (hard-to-get written material) and "microgreen" (a shoot of a standard salad plant.)

No matter how odd some of the words might seem, the dictionary editors say each has the promise of sticking around in the American vocabulary.

"There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like 'ginormous,'" said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."

One of those naysayers is Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.

"A new word that stands out and is ostentatious is going to sink like a lead balloon," he said. "It might enjoy a fringe existence."

"Plutoed" has been chosen as word of the year for 2006 by the American Dialect Society, beating "climate canary" in a run-off vote.

If you have been "plutoed" you have been demoted or devalued, just as happened to the former planet Pluto when its status was downgraded.

A "climate canary" is something whose poor health indicates a looming environmental catastrophe.

This is the 17th time ADS members have voted to choose a word of the year.

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show's host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005.

1. truthiness (noun)

1. : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2. : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

1. google
2. decider
3. war
4. insurgent
5. terrorism
6. vendetta
7. sectarian
8. quagmire
9. corruption

New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

Critics said the National Certificate of Educational Achievement or NCEA, the main qualification for high school students, would be degraded by the authority allowing text speak use in exams.

Internet blogger Phil Stevens was not amused by the announcement. "nzqa[New Zealand Qualifications Authority]: u mst b joking," Stevens wrote. "or r u smoking sumthg?"

Usage: 'Google' as noun referring to, well, us.

Example: "I just love Google, they're soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!"

Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There's no question here that you're referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.

Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.

Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.

Britons are increasingly tech-savvy but are still bamboozled by tech jargon.

According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.

So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.

Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.

Search engine giant Google has sent off a series of legal letters to media organizations, warning them against using its name as a verb. The California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation, with a spokesman confirming that it had sent the letters, saying, "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case "g", was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book. Meanwhile, the online service WordSpy, defines "google" as: "To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." This is also what pops up first if you type "googling" into Google.

In an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised sneers after they were leaked on to the web, with bloggers making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

However, according to the Independent's report, eyebrows may be raised, too, in the publishing and media industries, which are worried about Google's encroachment on their intellectual property via its Google News pages and its plan to put every book ever published on to the web.

For each word, we performed a Yahoo image search and retrieved 50 image results. (If fewer than 50 images were found, we deemed the word too obscure and discarded it.) Then for each image we averaged the values of the pixels in the middle and then averaged those 50 results. We brightened the colors slightly for display.

Need tips on how to groom a unibrow or soul patch? Just google it. Or get a mouse potato to do it for you. If you're still lost, grab the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for a definition of those and about 100 other words that have made their way into its pages. But be warned: you might come across a drama queen (a person given to often excessively emotional performances or reactions), an empty suit (an ineffectual executive), or a himbo (an attractive but vacuous man _ think "male bimbo".)

"We try to have a mix that addresses the wide range of people's information needs when adding new words," said John Morse, president of the Springfield-based dictionary publisher. "It could be a technical term or some light-hearted slang that sends people to a dictionary." To make it into the dictionary, a word has to be more than a flash-in-the-pan fad. It needs staying power.

"We need evidence that the word is showing up in publications that people are reading on an everyday basis," Morse said. Lexicographers comb through national newspapers, entertainment magazines, trade journals and Web sites in search of new words and phrases. As has been the case during the past several years, Merriam-Webster's lexicographers have been largely preoccupied with technology and computers for its latest edition, which will be widely available at the end of the summer.

Some 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as "other."

But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent.

*****

English may be eating up other languages, but paradoxically translation into English is vital for their survival, Mr. Rushdie said. "People are not going to learn Serbian," he said. "If Serbian writers are going to survive in the world, they will have to be translated into English."

*****

"Some languages are dying and some are appearing," she said. "That is a much deeper and more interesting dynamic." Maybe, Ms. Ugresic said, the new language of globalization will be "Smurfentaal," a kind of slang with bits of Dutch and other languages, among them Moroccan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish, spoken by young people on the streets of Amsterdam. "Every honest linguist will tell you the preservation of language is a lost battle," Ms. Ugresic said, "because you can't deal with language dogmatically. Language is a living thing. "So let it go."

Brookes is not an environmentalist partial to the wood pigeon, but instead editor of the Chambers Dictionary, and is seeking to keep words from disappearing in the publisher's next edition which is slated for release in August.

"We've resisted the temptation for tossing words out," he said Monday at the London Book Fair.

Also on the save list are jobernowl (blockhead), logodaedalus (someone skilled in the manipulative use of words), incompossible (incapable of co-existing) and supernaculum (to the last drop), the kinds of words typically omitted by one-volume dictionaries once they fall out of usage.

A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as "Katrinagate," the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane. Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said "truthiness" means "truthy, not facty."

The word, of course, is derived from a combination of "broadcasting" and the Apple listening device "iPod." Some have said they resent the Apple branding and proposed "audioblogging" or "blogcast" or some such as an alternative, to no avail.

Oxford apparently will define the word as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player." The term was coined, according to the BBC, by journalist Ben Hammersley. Podcast was considered for the honor last year, but didn't gain wide use until this year.

"A rootkit is a set of software tools frequently used by a third party (usually an intruder) after gaining access to a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes, files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system without the user's knowledge. Rootkits are known to exist for a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Solaris and versions of Microsoft Windows. A computer with a rootkit on it is called a rooted computer."

"The rootkit concept is the dominant controversial aspect of the 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy, which has made the previously obscure concept of a rootkit much more widely known in the technology community, and to the general public."

A cliche is not just something that lots of people say; It's something that lots of people say and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliche is, in other words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse.

I have my own test to see if a phrase is a cliche or not. I read the first half of the sentence, then I ask myself, "do I just know (because everyone knows) how the sentence ends?" Someone recently submitted, "The gene pool could use a little chlorine." I knew this wasn't a cliche because when I say, "The gene pool could use what?" I don't know how to end the sentence.

"Heteroflexible" is someone who is usually -- but not always -- heterosexual.

"Supersize," the fast food menu word for big portions, can now be both an adjective and a verb, as in "supersize me."

And to "go commando" means "to wear no underpants."