The Word of The Year is “App” [A Year Late?]


The American Dialect Society has chosen “app”, short for application as the word of the year. The word “app” received 69 votes to be chosen over “junk”, “WikiLeaks”, “nom”, “trend”, “fat-finger” and “-pad”.

Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society , executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine, said the following to support their choice.

App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle behind the slogan “There’s an app for that,” plus the arrival of “app stores” for a wide spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12 months. One of the most convincing arguments from the voting floor was from a woman who said that even her grandmother had heard of it.

I’d  personally believe it’s a year too late but I guess this society best represents the common people and late technology adopters. The last year they chose “tweet” as the word of the year. I wonder if next year it would be something related to Facebook’s upcoming messaging system.

[via TUAW]


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