'w00t' Named 2007 Word of the Year

bukharin writes "'w00t', the "small word that packs a pretty big punch", has been named Word of the Year for 2007 by dictionary gurus Merriam-Webster. Visitors to the Merriam-Webster website were asked to vote for one of 20 commonly searched words and phrases. Facebook was the runner-up. Previously honored geek words include google (runner-up in 2006) and blog (winner in 2004)."

What?

I haven't seen anyone use "w00t" in about three years.

Re:What?

ya rly

Re:What?

It's definitely on the decline in nerd culture. I guess the rest of the world is picking through our discards.

Re:What?

It's hard to see it in any context but geek culture. I can't imagine that many people will even think it means anything other than some other misspelling.

Ladies and gentlemen, Merriam-Webster has officially jumped the shark.

Re:What?

A friend of mine's license plate is w00t. And he's a geek but by no means a cripplingly stunted one. Then again, the fact that the license plate was available says loads about just how important this word is to geek culture...not very.

re: Dictionaries jumping the shark...no kidding. Then again, dictionaries aren't supposed to be up to date so much as a conservative normalizing force in language usage. IIRC, the first dictionaries were intended to regularize spelling variations, more so than be comprehensive catalogues of words in usage.

Re:What?

It's hard to see it [w00t] in any context but geek culture.

I don't know, I stay up most every night until 12:01 waiting for the next w00t [woot.com]. When there's a woot-off [wikipedia.org], forget about it - I'm up all night!

Of course, my wife has observed that I might have a w00t *problem*.

Wowwee Roboquad Interactive Robot, LeakFrog 2-Pack,Micro Remote Control Helicopter, Xact Seven Mile Professional Two-Way Radios, Jabra C820s Noise Canceling Headphones, Microsoft Zune 30GB Digital Media Player, SanDisk Sansa e250 2GB Media Player, Saitek A100 MySpkr Personal Stereo Speaker, Netgear 802.11g Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter - 2 Pack, Nyko Air Flo EX USB Controller for PC/MAC - 2 Pack, Xact 2-Way FRS/GMRS Wristwatch Radios, Pinnacle DVD Maker Deluxe, USB Missile Launcher, Sony NW-S703 1GB MP3 Player with Noise Cancelling Headphones, Chaucer's Mead Trio, HealthPro Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor, Gourmet Coffee Cafe Single Serving Coffeemaker with Free Coffee, Sling Media SlingBox Classic, Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 w/ GPS Locator Hardware, Netgear 108Mbps Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter, iRobot Roomba 4296 Remote Scheduler Robotic Vacuum, Siemens Bluetooth Car Kit

I suspect that I may have been 0wn3d.

Re:What?

Word!!!

Re:What?

We pwned the English!

Fixed that for you.

Re:What?

So? When was the last time you saw anyone use 'sardoodledom' (one of the other nominees)?

That's quite a conundrum. I'm not trying to start a blamestorm here, but it appears you may be an apathetic charlatan. Sardoodledom.

Sorry, someone had to do it (w00t!).

What???

Who still uses w00t? I haven't used that since like 1998... What's the PHRASE of 2007, "All your base are belong to us?"

Re:What???

According to my inbox, the most popular word for 2007 appears to be "V1@grA"

Re:What???

This year I'm thinking of getting jerseys made and leading a team at the 24 hours of big bear as "Team V1@gra". Our motto, also on the jerseys, will be "Ride Hard"

Re:What???

I would have voted for MegaDik. Some of those MegaDik spams are funnier than entire episodes of Everybody loves Raymond. My favorite is: " Now that you've got a gal that's hot You wanna hump her moistened twat. She looks so sizzling, she's so nice! But would your penile size suffice? Not sure she will long for more? You need a thing she would adore! But how to get it long and thick? Your only chance is MegaDik! You'll get so wanted super-size And see wild craving in her eyes! Your rod will bang her box so deep, Tonight you'll hardly fall asleep! " Although the fact that they are having "Holiday Specials" now is pretty damn funny too.

Re:What???

Burma-Shave [wikipedia.org]?

Re:What???

Also funnier than Everybody Loves Raymond:

1) dead tree stump
2) Charles Manson
3) Carrot Top

Ok, maybe that last one was a little too far...

Re:What???

No the key phrase for years 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 is "This is the year of Linux on the desktop"

That is quite exciting

I am elated by this news. I feel a great sense of triumph that this word has received such an honor. If only there were some word that could express my happiness at this victory for geek-kind, perhaps a word with numbers substituted for letters somewhere.

Oh well, I guess I'll just go with "yay".

a word with numbers in it?

I thought the correct representation was w00t, with 'zeroes' and not capital O's, as in wOOt.

Re:a word with numbers in it?

I mean, how "correct" are we being with this. I always thought w00t was a l33t thing. I have never seen it used outside of computer geek circles really and it's assumed that j00r sp34k1n6 1|\| l33t s0 7h3 00z 4r3 7h3r3.

I guess there is some truthiness with how they pick their words though.

Veni, Vidi, Vici

can now be summarized as "mount, grep, w00t"

Re:Veni, Vidi, Vici

gawk, date, grep, touch, finger, unzip, strip, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, yes, yes, yes, unmount, make clean, zip, sleep

google

The only reason google lost is because the criterion was the most "commonly searched for words". If someone can already search, how likely are they to search for "google"?

Yes but...

...what is the w00t of the year?

I can just see the future...

Word of the year in 2012? Über.

2013: Slashvertisement
2014: fucktard
2015:1337

Re:I can just see the future...

2011: lolcat

Re:I can just see the future...

2010: asstunnel

WTF?

Leet-speak from 2001 gets named "word of the year" in 2007? How does that work?

Next year I suppose it'll be "pwned."

£4m3.

Re:WTF?

So you're saying the "word of the year" competition is m00t?

Re:WTF?

They must just now be discovering Microsoft's leet speak tutorial archives [archive.org].

Microsoft got boring though, now that page simply redirects here [microsoft.com] instead.

It's interesting to follow the revision histories on that page on archive.org. It started out pretty much as my first link, then they removed the "illegal activities" section probably out of political correctness and not wanting to damage their reputation, and now there's no info on leetspeak at all.

Follow ups

Following "w00t" in the list of most searched-for terms were such terms as "clearasil" and "cheetos".

answer me these questions 3

w00t is your name? w00t is your favourite color? w00t is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow!!!!!

At least it's not...

Bling
Jiggy
Fresh
Bad
Gnarly
Dude

or any of the popular slang words from our childhood... of course those were all 3-5 years old by the time they reached nationwide popularity too..

It does represent the shifting focus of teen age pop culture however... surfer, skater, rocker, DJ Mixer, hip-hopper, Rap Star, Nerd, Hacker

What's next? ask the kids... they know.

These guys will be thrilled

woot! [woot.com]

For those not familiar with the site, they sell one product a day, until it's gone, at a deep discount. Today (12/13/2007) it's a NavMan GPS for $149.

I hit the site every day.

All I have to say is

\o/

It's the end of the world

I believe this is the first sign of the apocalypse.

1989 called

arsenio hall wants his word back.

What about this word of the year?

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Re:What about this word of the year?

I make that to be 4 words, assuming a word length of 32 bits.

You'd think that...

Merriam-Webster's word of the year would be in their dictionary.

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/w00t [m-w.com]. Odd that.

Merriam-Webster needs to leave the house more...

Pecksniffian? Pecksniffian was in the running??

Seriously???

W00t aint a word

It aint a word because it contains two numbers. Who ever thought to give it a title is a tw4t.

Etymology

The Etymology according to the wiktionary [wiktionary.org]

Of uncertain origin; theories include:

• an acronym from "we own the other team";
• an onomatopoeia representing the sound of capture sirens from online capture the flag games;
• a blend of wow and loot;
• a leetspeak mutation of whoo, what or root;
• a corruption of root, shouted by hackers when they obtain root-level access in a targeted system.

w00t first released

I don't know about you, but I first saw w00t circa 1990 on efnet #hack... didnt he have an account on upt.org?

Mmmkay...

From the article:

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you've selected ...

Um... so this word was selected by a "vast majority" of the "thousands" that participated in selecting the Word of the Year.

Does anyone else think that this was just a joke played by some highschool kids saying that they own your website? The only reason "pwned" (or any variation of it) wasn't used is because it would be too obvious that scriptkiddies rigged your election.

Alternative Definition

I've also seen woot as an acronym for "(i) Want One Of Those", as in Woot.Com [woot.com] and the more interesting iWoot.com [iwoot.com], which is kind of a british ThinkGeek.

Woot

Doesn't surprise me. I acutally knew someone at the SD ambassadors of excellence camp whose name was woot, because his original given name when he was born in norway was too hard to pronounce in english.

Opps...

For awhile any website that asked for a e-mail that really did not need it. I used the e-mail address [e-mail], I felt bad once I discovered woot.com was actually a website, and the amount of spam that I know have going to them.

Most of the runner-ups aren't current either

Take a look at words like hypocrite, conundrum, quixotic; none of these words is current. It would appear that voters didn't care if a word was actually USED in 2007, just that they liked the word and thought it deserved mention. Pecksniffian dates as far back as 1894.

The real winner of 2007:

NO CARE EVER.

December 12, 2007.

The day the language died.

Rape

Some of the internet-induced changes to language are cheeky and fun, but some are ominous. I remember how horrible it was the first time I heard "rape" being used as an analogy for "pwn." At the time I was going out with a girl who was a rape counselor, so maybe I was hyper-sensitive at the time. But, what really disturbed me was how even knowing how I felt about that usage, I started to use the word in that context myself. I wonder how such a change in language might impact the real-world offense. Do people now soften a bit as they associate a tragic news story with last night's beat down in Alterac Valley?

Another word

I think there's one more word [youtube.com] that should be considered. ;)

Merriam-Webster is just promoting woot.com

Ahh, those clever guys pushing woot.com...

Seriously though, who visits Merriam-Webster, m-w.com, and looks up definitions or even votes? Who does that? This is a silly little web poll on their site. Meh. move along, nothing to see here.

w00t

As far as I know, it started out as "We owned other team." Anyone else have a differing idea about its origin?

w00t comes from the dance scene of the early 90s?

This article [doubletongued.org] claims that w00t originated in the dance scene of the early 90s.

The story of woot, as we know it, is simple. There were two similar songs on the charts that year. In April "Whoot There It Is" by 95 South (Ichiban Records) was the number seven best-selling song in Central Florida, according, to the Orlando Sentinel. "Whoomp! (There It Is)," by Tag Team (Life Records) out of Atlanta showed up at number 15 on Billboard's R&B singles 27 May 1993 and stayed for 45 weeks on the Billboard top 100, where it reached number 2. It was the more popular of the two songs.

Elsewhere woot is claimed to come from root, the user name given in Unix-based operating systems to the administrator's account. This lacks any supporting evidence at all, except for dubious claims of "I remember," and is rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.

Wasn't there a hacker group known as w00t around that time frame as well? Whatever happened to them?

- SR

LLAMAS

You guys are all a bunch of LLAMAS

Thanks for nothing

We were going along nicely on this 12th day of December, almost forgetting the ridiculous amount of human stupidity displayed throughout this year, looking forward for 2008 to try and better ourselves. Now this piece of "news".

*sobs softly*

wOOt not in the dictionary

Sorry if this has already been pointed out, but try looking up 'wOOt' in their dictionary - it's not there. They suggested 'wot' or 'way-out' instead.

Meaning of woot

I've seen the use of the word WOOT for a very long time, and I've always understood the origin to have the meaning of "We Own the Other Team".

Language issues.

Last year I attended a conference. woot.com was one of the sponsors. At the closing ceremony they passed out some swag from that company to the attendees - in a container boldly labeled with the company logo.

When I got home and she saw it my wife was ROTFL.

She's one of the couple hundred remaining speakers of the west-coast American Indian trade jargon. And it seems that, in that language, the word for the male organ is (approximately) WOOT-`let.

Shades of 18th century viagra ads.

I thought it was locavour

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16411904 [npr.org]

Corporadoes

I vote for "corporadoes" [google.com]. "2007: the Year of Corporadoes" seems about right.