Words of the decade
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A piece of fluff on the op-ed page of the NYT on December 28: Philip Niemeyer, "Picturing the Past 10 Years", with an item a year for 2000 through 2009 in twelve categories. The last two categories are words: Nouns and Verbs.
There are no statistics here, just someone's judgments about what was hot in each year; others would no doubt have made other choices. For the last two categories:
Nouns:
2000: glitch
2001: news cycle
2002: freedom fries
2003: spider hole
2004: friendly fire
2005: truthiness
2006: chatter
2007: surge
2008: hope
2009: Auto-Tune
Verbs:
2000: I.M.
2001: outsource
2002: download
2003: punk'd
2004: Swift boat
2005: Google
2006: text
2007: blog
2008: go rogue
2009: crowd source
We've commented on a few of these on Language Log (truthiness, for example) and used some of the others (crowd source).