Browsing the apps available for my iPhone, I noticed that you can buy the Concise Oxford Dictionary and for the US there is the New Oxford American Dictionary.

The publications however have not just been using new media and technologies to reach new audiences – they have also been including technological words in the list of the word of the year as a result of changes to the English vocabulary.

‘Unfriend’, meaning to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a site such as Facebook, was chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in America.

Other words in the list, which was commissioned by Oxford University Press, come from the economy, fashion, and politics.

Many of the words are however familiar to those of us marketing online and using social media.

The Words of the Year 2009 included:

• 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
• 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.
• Minute mentoring – noun: a system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.
• Paywall – noun: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers
• 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
• Tweetup – noun: a meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter. [from tweet + up on the pattern of MEETUP]
• Unfriend/defriend – verb: to remove from one’s ‘friends’ list (e.g. 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.

Read more about the words of the year in the Telegraph.

I know that I’ve used a number of those words during 2009 – though I have to say I have never heard of ‘minute mentoring’ – I wonder if I should start to charge for my mentoring services by the minute?

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