Jar of Juice

I don’t know if this is a good day or a sad day for the English language, but the fact remains that a l33t word has made it into – at least for now – the online Merriam-Webster dictionary as it has announced it is Word of the Year 2007. The word in question is w00t (with two zeros in case the font makes it look like the letter “o”). It now even has a wiki entry.

Here an excerpt of the news (the Gamespot version):

Popular gaming acronym w00t has been named as the dictionary-meister’s Word of the Year 2007. The word was chosen after the “vast majority” of visitors to its Web site voted for it.

However, this doesn’t mean that the word will necessarily make its way into the regular, printed edition of the dictionary, although the fact that it has been voted top dog online obviously gives its chances a boost.

The neologism “w00t” is written with two zeroes instead of o’s, much like other “l33t”-speak words, and is sometimes claimed to mean “We Owned the Other Team,” though it has come to be a general exclamation to express pleasure or success.

The official definition for w00t from Merriam-Webster is “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay’.”