W0rd Of The Year

I read on Yahoo News today that Merriam-Webster has announced it's word of the year for 2007... "w00t."

"W00t," which is a way of expressing excitement or happiness, was first used by online gamers, but eventually caught on with non-gamers, too.

I found it a little weird that a word that isn't even a real word was chosen as "word of the year"... especially because it's made of letters AND numbers... But I suppose it makes sense that this "word" would win the title of word of the year, because it reflects how language has started to evolve thanks to new technologies, especially the internet.

The article wasn't clear as to whether or not "w00t" is actually being added to the dictionary, so I did a search for it on dictionary.com. It appears as though it's not in the dictionary (yet?), but there was a link provided to acronym.com, where regular people can post definitions for it.

But I kind of hope "w00t" doesn't go any further than the internet... to me it would be worse than when people say "brb" or "jk" in real-life conversation.