SPRINGFIELD, Mass.—Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to "w00t."
"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.
Merriam-Webster president John Morse said "w00t" was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.
"It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," Morse said.
Gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, Morse says, creating what they call "l33t speak." That's "leet" when spoken, short for "elite" to the rest of the world.
For technophobes, the word also is familiar from the 1990 movie "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts startles her date's upper-crust friends with a hearty "Woot, woot, woot!" at a polo match.
Purists of "l33t speak" often substitute a "7" for the final "t," expressing a "w007" of victory -- an "in your face" of sorts -- when they defeat an online gaming opponent.
"W00t" was among 20 nominees in a list of the most-searched words in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary and most frequently submitted terms from users of its "open dictionary."
Technology is influencing everyday language more than ever before, Morse said, citing such text message and instant-message abbreviations as BRB ("be right back") and POS ("parent over shoulder").
But whether those terms or "l33t speak" have a lasting effect on language has yet to be seen.
Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, says he thinks the new terms are clever but not permanent.
"There have been lots of whimsical coinages of words over the years, most of which disappear rather quickly," said Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill.
"W00t" didn't make him exclaim in enthusiasm.
"It's amusing, but it's limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last," he said.
The 2006 pick, "truthiness," also had its roots in pop culture. It was coined by Comedy Central satirical political commentator Stephen Colbert.
Some also-rans in the 2007 list: the use of "facebook" as a verb to signify using the online site by that name; nuanced terms such as "quixotic" and "hypocrite"; and "blamestorm," a meeting in which mistakes are aired, fingers are pointing and much discomfort is had by all.
"Blamestorm" and "w00t" won't be added to the mainstream dictionary anytime soon, though. Nor will "facebook," "quixotic" and "hypocrite" shoot to the top of the most-searched words.
That honor, by far, goes to a word pair that's posed a "conundrum" -- another top 10 word for 2007 -- to generations of book-report writers.
"Affect and effect. Year after year, by far, they're persistently the most looked-up, no question about it," Morse said.
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