The American Dialect Society has announced that their 20th annual “Word of the Year” is “tweet”.
The “Word of the Decade” is “google”.
Interestingly, Twitter Inc attempted to register ‘tweet’ as a trademark in August 2009 see informed discussion here at Sam Johnson’s site.
“Google” naturally is trademarked but with the capitalisation and Google Inc have previously gone to great lengths – with varying degrees of success – to prevent their valuable name going the same way as xerox, kleenex, escalator and tannoy to name but a few genericized trademarks.
The word of the year and word of the decade both have owners? In the case of ‘tweet’ it’s not so clear cut – the users of Twitter seem to have coined the phrase before the company made it official.
I wouldn’t hold out much hope of Twitter successfully registering that trademark, but stranger things have happened.
[Update: Word of the Year for 2010 is “app”, as in “There’s an app for that”, or “app store”]
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