Words of the Year 2009

Words of the Year 2009

Bossnapping – noun: (in France) the prevention of senior managers from leaving company premises for a period of time by their employees, in order to protest about large-scale redundancies and cutbacks

Zombie bank – noun: a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Geoengineering/ecohacking – noun: the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.

Jeggings – plural noun: close-fitting leggings made of fabric that resembles denim in appearance [from jeans + leggings]

Minute mentoring – noun: a system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.
Phantonym – noun: a word that looks as it if means one thing but in fact means something quite different. [from ‘phantom + antonym]
(for example fulsome, used by President Obama to mean ‘full’, when in fact it is now chiefly used in reference to excessive flattery).

Tweetup – noun: a meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter. [from tweet + up on the pattern of MEETUP]

Staycation – noun: a holiday spent in one's home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions

Simples – exclamation: used to say that something is very easy to achieve [from the 'compare the meerkat' TV advert]

Great Recession – noun: term for the current recession, modelled on the Great Depression.

Hashtag – noun: 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.

Freemium – noun: 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

Paywall – noun: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

Unfriend/defriend – verb: to remove from one's ‘friends’ list (e.g. on a social networking website)

Tag cloud – noun: a visual depiction of the word content of a website, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence or frequency of the words or tags depicted.

Slashdot effect – noun: the slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one.

Snollygoster – noun: a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician

Redact – verb: censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.

Epigenome – noun: the pattern of chemical switches in all 2000 types of human cell that indexes genetic information

(source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6905776/Tweetups-and-unfriend-among-Oxford-English-Dictionarys-words-of-the-year.html )