Last week at its annual meeting, the American Dialect Society voted on the words of the year. The society named "App" the word of the year, though it was a close contest. Many votes were also cast for "Nom," which NPR describes as "a chat-, tweet-, and text-friendly syllable that connotes 'yummy food."
Ben Zimmer, who is the chair of the New Words committee, as well as the "On Language" columnist for the New York Times Magazine said this of the winner in a recent press release from the ADS: “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.”
Duke University Press publishes American Speech, the official journal of the American Dialect Society. If you're interested in new, or newly popular words, you can read the feature "Among the New Words" in each issue of the journal.
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