Words of 2009, Includes Hashtag, Freemium and…Tweetup
Posted: December 29th, 2009 | Filed under: News | | 3 Comments »
Tweetups are happening all around the Globe
Susie Dent, an English lexicographer, and popular dictionary expert, has presented the Words of 2009 and our very own Tweetup made the list.
The story has appeared in several major news outlets, including the Yorkshire Evening Post. Here’s a rundown of all the words that made her list this year.
* Bossnapping – noun: (in France) The prevention of senior managers from leaving company
* Zombie bank – noun: A financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support.
* Geoengineering/ecohacking – noun: The deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.
* Jeggings – plural noun: Close-fitting leggings made of fabric that resembles denim in appearance (from jeans + leggings).
* Minute mentoring – noun: A system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.
* Phantonym – noun: A word that looks as it if means one thing but in fact means something quite different (from phantom + antonym).
* Tweetup – noun: A meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter.
* Staycation – noun: A holiday spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions
* Simples – exclamation: Used to say that something is very easy to achieve (from the “compare the meerkat” TV advert).
* Great Recession – noun: Term for the current recession, modelled on the Great Depression.
* Hashtag – noun: A £ (hash) sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.
* Freemium – noun: A business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.
* Paywall – noun: A way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers.
* Unfriend/defriend – verb: To remove from one’s “friends” list (eg on a social networking website)
* Tag cloud – noun: A visual depiction of the word content of a website, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence or frequency of the words or tags depicted.
* Slashdot effect – noun: The slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one
