And Merriam-Webster's word of the year is…

MANILA – Merriam-Webster has announced its Top 10 words this year -- and “selfie” is not included in the list.

The American dictionary publisher took a more academic approach and declared “science” as its 2013 Word of the Year.

The results are said to be based on around 100 million lookups a month.

“It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition,” said editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski in a statement released on Merriam-Webster’s website, referring to the word "science."

“A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about ‘phony’ science, or whether science held all the answers. It’s a topic that has great significance for us. And it fascinates us—enough so that it saw a 176% increase in lookups this year over last, and stayed a top lookup throughout the year,” Sokolowski added.

Landing in second place after “science” is “cognitive,” followed by “rapport,” “communication,” “niche,” “ethic,” “paradox,” “visceral,” “integrity” and “metaphor.”

Merriam-Webster associate editor Kory Stamper noted how a lot of people searched for “niche” to know how the word is pronounced.

“The spike in lookups may well be entirely related to the pronunciation of the word. Is it ‘NITCH’ or ‘NEESH’ or ‘NISH’?” Stamper said. “It’s a happy reminder that people do use the dictionary to check spellings and pronunciations of words.”

Last month, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “selfie,” a self-portrait usually on a smartphone or webcam, as its word of the year.

This after the term gained momentum as a social media buzzword, the dictionary said in a statement.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

'Selfie' beats 'twerk' as word of the year

LONDON -- "Selfie," a self portrait usually on a smartphone or webcam,was selected word of the year on Tuesday by the Oxford Dictionaries, based on a 17,000% rise in its usage from a year ago.

"Selfie" was chosen after it "gained momentum throughout the English-speaking world in 2013 as it evolved from a social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph," Oxford Dictionaries said in a statement.

The spike in popularity of the word, whose origin can be traced back to an Australian online forum in 2002, was based on "language research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors," the publisher said.

"Selfie" beat a number of other buzzwords of 2013, including "twerk" referring to dancing in a sexually provocative manner and which was popularized by singer Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards last August.

"The Word of the Year need not have been coined within the past 12 months and it does not have to be a word that will stick around for a good length of time," Judy Pearsall, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, said.

"It is very difficult to predict accurately which new words will have staying power, and only time will tell if these words have lasting significance," she added.

"Selfie" has spawned a raft of spinoffs, including "helfie" for a picture taken of someone's own hair, "belfie" for taking a picture of your own posterior and "drelfie" for a self portrait while in a drunken state.

The word's usage was based on statistical analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, which is a structured set of texts stored electronically, and specifically the New Word Monitor Corpus, Oxford Dictionaries said.

It said that the New Monitor Corpus collects around 150 million words in use each month, using automated criteria to scan new web content using the English language worldwide.

This is used to track and verify new and emerging words and senses on a daily basis, and the firm has a dedicated team of editors whose job it is to add new words to the Oxford English Dictionary and OxfordDictionaries.com using this data.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com