‘Unfriend’ Selected as Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year
The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen the word ‘unfriend’ as its 2009 Word of the Year:
“unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. ”
“As in, ‘I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight’.”
” ‘It has both currency and potential longevity,’ notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. ‘In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year’.”
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November 19th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
any competition from ‘defriend’?
of course one could use existing words, but ‘anathemize’ is probably too hard to spell.