Jessica Brodsky, “‘Hashtag’ Voted Word of the Year by American Dialect Society” (Brown Daily Herald, Jan. 25, 2013)
The Word of the Year is one that is rarely spoken.
The word “hashtag” — the act of using a pound sign (#) followed by a word or phrase to tag a message on Twitter — was dubbed “Word of the Year 2012” by the American Dialect Society Jan. 4.
The word “hashtag” was created for Twitter in 2007 by compounding the British term for the pound symbol and “tag,” Twitter’s mechanism for categorizing posts. New words are formed from “building blocks that often come from other words, or else they may be common prefixes or suffixes that are attached to some base,” said Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
“As that word became more common, people didn’t think of it as being a compound anymore,” Zimmer said.
Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)