Thursday, December 20, 2007

More on w00t...

Today's Guardian features a beginner's guide to what they term "Geekspeak", or what others term "Leetspeak". The Merriam Webster US Dictionary has chosen w00t as its word of the year, but as this article points out, w00t has been around for a long time in gaming and hacker circles.

Some of the other terms covered are LOLcats, teh and LQTM, all of which are interesting examples of language change processes in action (acronyms and compounds in the case of LOLcats, random fluctuation for teh and initialism for LQTM).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations

Getting the Word Out 2022

WOTY (Word of the Year) Season is in full swing and the lists from the various dictionaries and organisations who produce them, along with t...