Did you know the naming of a ‘Word of the Year’ is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the early 1990s, when the American Dialect Society began to announce its annual choice?

The words chosen by the American Dialect Society often have international significance or recognition: information superhighway (1993), millennium bug (1997), weapon of mass destruction (2002), metrosexual  (2003). Some of their choices inevitably have an American bias, since a word that achieves prominence in one country does not necessarily do so in others—thus the Dialect Society’s choice of soccer mum (1996), chad (2000) ‘a piece of waste material removed from card or tape by punching’ (a word that assumed some notoriety in the presidential election), and truthiness (2005).

At times the choice has seemed a bit eccentric, as when the verb pluto was chosen in 2006 in the sense ‘to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet’.

By 2007 there were other organisations joining the ‘Word of the Year’ game. Oxford University Press in the United States was first cab off the rank for the 2007 Word of the Year with locavore, a blend of local and the -vore element in words such as carnivore, herbivore, and so on, and meaning ‘a person who buys and eats food grown in the local area’.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary group chose w00t (note that the ‘double o’ is represented by ‘double zero’), a term originally from online gambling, an exclamation functioning as an expression of joy and excitement. The Macquarie Dictionary group in Australia chose pod slurping: ‘the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3 player or memory stick from a computer’.

At the Australian National Dictionary Centre they started to wonder: where have we been in 2007? Had their collective lexicographical heads at the Centre been buried in the sand? The American Dialect Society restored some sense of credibility to the ‘Word of the Year’ exercise with their choice of subprime, used as an adjective ‘to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment’. This was certainly closer to the mark.

In 2006 the Australian National Dictionary Centre chose the verb and noun podcast as its word of the year, acknowledging the fact that this international word had spread with extraordinary speed and ubiquity. For 2007, subprime was on the list of favourites, but in Australia there was one word that gathered to itself immense local significance: me-tooism. This word first appeared in the United States in 1949, and the political meaning was strongly to the fore: ‘The practice of adopting or imitating a policy successfully or popularly proposed by a rival person or party; the practice of following a popular trend.’

Although me-tooism is not an exclusively Australian word, it certainly became a political buzzword in Australia in the election environment of 2007, and it was clearly used much more intensively in Australia than in any other country. In Australia, it was closely followed by mortgage stress, a term that has become even more common in 2008. Me-tooism, however, is the Australian National Dictionary Centre’s 2007 Australian Word of the Year.

Australian National Dictionary Centre