NOAD Word of the Year: "Unfriend"

The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2009: it's unfriend, defined as "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Readers of this space will be quite familiar with the term, as I discussed it along with similar un-verbs on Word Routes in May and then again in September as a followup to my On Language column in the New York Times Magazine, "The Age of Undoing." It's nice to feel ahead of the curve on this one, but truth be told, unfriending has been going on for many years.

The hosts of the public radio program "A Way with Words" tweeted the NOAD announcement with the snarky reaction, "Hi. Welcome to five years ago." But if you're a member of the LiveJournal community, it might feel even older than that. Way back on October 1, 2001, long before Facebook even existed, "Noël" posted a LiveJournal entry entitled "On Friending," considering the ramifications of adding acquaintances to one's "friends list" and then later dropping them:

Please note, defriending you does not mean I suddenly hate you or think less of you or that I'm no longer your friend/acquaintance, etc. I have people I know in real life who aren't on my friendslist, and conversely I've had real life friends unfriend me because they have no idea what I'm talking about. ...
I do not do knee jerk retaliatory de-friending. (Nor do I moan/bitch/complain if I've defriended your "Friends Only" journal and you've removed me-- obviously that makes sense.) If you unfriend me, I may or may not unfriend you.

It's interesting that Noël alternated freely between defriend and unfriend in her post. Both terms continued to be used on LiveJournal, and then on other social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, though it does seem that the un- form is edging out the de- form these days.

NOAD's runner-up list has some terms that might feel a bit fresher to the digerati. One of the technological terms on the list is intexticated, "distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle." That's a clear cousin of the Webster's New World selection for Word of the Year, announced two weeks ago: distracted driving.

Here's a sampling of other runners-up from NOAD:

Technology

• hashtag: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets
• netbook : a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory
• paywall : a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

Economy

• freemium: a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content
• funemployed: taking advantage of one?s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests
• zombie bank: a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Environment

• brown state: a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations
• green state: a US state that has strict environmental regulations
• ecotown: a town built and run on eco-friendly principles

The Word of the Year season will culminate with the most prestigious selection from the American Dialect Society at their annual meeting on January 8. If you'd like to submit your own candidates, the ADS is now accepting nominations from the public for both Word of the Year and Word of the Decade (2000-2009). You can find out more on the ADS website.