Mallary Jean Tenore, “2011 Word of the Year Shows How Old Words Take on New Meanings” (Poynter, Jan. 9, 2012)

The American Dialect Society has chosen “occupy” as the 2011 Word of the Year. “It has taken on new parts of speech (as an imperative verb: ‘Occupy!’ or as an attributive noun: ‘the Occupy movement’) and new meanings, related to the protest movement and its style of demonstrations,” Ben Zimmer, chair of the organization’s New Words Committee, told me. “It was also remarkable how the word itself contributed to the movement’s success.”

Read the rest here.

Stephanie Gallman, “Linguists Name ‘Occupy’ as 2011’s Word of the Year” (CNN, Jan. 8, 2012)

The linguists have spoken and they have decided — “Occupy” is 2011’s word of the year.

Members of the American Dialect Society came out in record numbers to vote Friday night at the organization’s annual conference, held this year in Portland, Oregon.

“Occupy” won a runoff vote by a whopping majority, earning more votes than “FOMO” (an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out,” describing anxiety over being inundated by the information on social media) and “the 99%,” (those held to be at a financial or political disadvantage to the top moneymakers, the one-percenters).

Occupy joins previous year’s winners, “app,” “tweet,” and “bailout.”

“It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement,” Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, said in a statement.

Read the rest here.

Press release from the American Dialect Society, “‘Occupy’ is the 2011 Word of the Year” (Jan. 6, 2012)

In its 22nd annual words of the year vote, with record attendance, the American Dialect Society voted “occupy” (verb, noun, and combining form referring to the Occupy protest movement) as the word of the year for 2011.

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.

“It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement,” Zimmer said. “The movement itself was powered by the word.”

Read the rest here.

Interview on Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midmorning” about the notable words of 2011. (Dec. 30, 2011)

Each year, the American Dialect Society chooses a word of the year. Lexicographers Grant Barrett and Ben Zimmer join us to discuss the year in words. Based on the American Dialect Society’s criteria what words were demonstrably new or newly popular in 2011?

(Show page, audio, related Word Routes column, Boston Globe column)

Sam Biddle, “How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language” (Gizmodo, Dec. 28, 2011)

The hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence, a like yknowwwww that now permeates the internet outside of the tweets it was meant to corral. It pervades Facebook, texting, Foursquare—turning into a form of “ironic metadata,” as linguist Ben Zimmer of The Visual Thesaurus labels it.

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Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, on Word of the Year selections. (Dec. 27, 2011)

It’s also the time of the year when dictionary-writers and lexicographers pick a Word of the Year. I’ve admitted that I’m not a Word of the Day person, nor am I particularly a Word of the Year person, with a polite and apologetic tip of the hat to a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society.

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Interviewed on CNN Profiles about prominent words of the year. (Dec. 26, 2011)

CNN’s John Lisk talks words with Ben Zimmer, an expert on English linguistics. Which words were most prominently used in 2011? What are the frontrunners for “Word of the Year?”

(Show page, audio)

Amy Rosenberg, “Occupied with the Word of the Year 2011” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 26, 2011)

The American Dialect Society, which will announce its 20th annual Word of the Year on Jan. 5, found itself just one in a crowd of word obsessives this year as a formerly obscure venture went mainstream, or at least social media-stream. Words – everyone’s texting and hashtagging them.

“I see a social-media effect in terms of interest in talking about word of the year,” said Ben Zimmer, editor of the Visual Thesaurus and a leading WOTY guy, head of the Dialect Society’s New Words committee (a supercommittee if ever there was one.)

“It’s something that people latch on to. When you look at something like occupy as the front-runner, its success is its ability to be modulated, to fit in different environments. Twitter allows for it to spread quickly, boiling down a complex word or movement.”

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Interview on WCBS Newsradio about terms for dying, in the wake of the deaths of Kim Jong-Il and Vaclav Havel. (Dec. 22, 2012)

(Show page, related Word Routes column)

H. Samy Alim, “What if We Occupied Language?” (New York Times Opinionator, Dec. 21, 2011)

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy,” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

Read the rest here.