Social-networking site Facebook is displayed on a laptop screen.Dan Kitwood
Dipping its toe into the world of social networking, the venerable Oxford University Press has chosen "unfriend" as its 2009 Word of the Year.
A verb, to unfriend is "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," the Oxford English Dictionary publisher said in an announcement yesterday.
"It has both currency and potential longevity," Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer of Oxford's American dictionary program, wrote on the publisher's blog.
A favourite among the social networking crowd, unfriend is hardly new - its definitions in the online user-generated Urban Dictionary date back to 2004. However, Ms. Lindberg said it is rare that a verb includes the prefix "un," typically used in an adjective.
"Unfriend has real lex-appeal," she wrote.
Announcing a word of the year is a popular exercise. Merriam-Webster, a rival dictionary publisher, typically announces its own in December. The American Dialect Society will make its choice at a Baltimore conference in early January. (Last year, both those groups chose the same word: Bailout).
The crowning of unfriend was not met with universal praise.
"Oh dear," said veteran lexicographer David Barnhart, past president of the Dictionary Society of North America, when told of the selection. He doesn't expect unfriend to stand the test of time.
"Often what these groups, societies and individuals light upon is something that has what I like to call linguistic sex appeal. ... Very often they get tripped up by cute words that don't seem to have very much life."
Mr. Barnhart has kept a running list of his own 2009 Word of the Year candidates, to present when he attends the ADS meeting. It includes H1N1 or swine flu, death panel, shovel-ready, and vook (a video book).
"I really don't know what the word is going to be. I don't think it's going to be 'unfriend.' That really doesn't strike me as wonderful."
Unfriend beat out 18 other OUP finalists, including death panel, a theoretical body invoked in opposition to American health-care reform; funemployed, or enjoying one's unemployment; hashtag, a keyword used to sort themed topics on websites such as Twitter; and teabagger, a person who has opposed the American stimulus package through community protests akin to the Boston Tea Party.
Oxford's past words of the year include hypermiling, the attempt to maximize gas mileage by making adjustments to a vehicle or driving habits, in 2008; locavore, a consumer of locally grown foods, in 2007; carbon neutral, the reduction and offset of harmful carbon emissions, in 2006; and podcast, a downloadable audio file, in 2005.