Every year, the American Dialect Society nominates and then votes on a word of the year, and for 2012 it’s “hashtag.” It beat out other nominated words like “YOLO,” “Fiscal cliff,” and “Gangnam style.

In 1990, the American Dialect Society named its first "word of the year" — a word (or phrase) chosen by a group of linguists and professors that encapsulates how Americans have been speaking for the ...

The American Dialect Society—the same august, century-old body that brought us “-ussy” as its 2022 Word Of The Year—has gone ahead and once again decided to choose chaos, naming “rawdog” its WOTY for ...

Lovers of the English language are coming together to select the coolest word or phrase. Last year, app was voted the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Now that group of etymologists, ...

We’ve been talking about words of the year for a month now. Oxford Dictionaries chose “selfie” as its word of the year; Merriam-Webster chose “science.” “Twerk” got a lot of attention, but didn’t ...

The American Dialect Society announces the "word of the year" next week. Word scholars and the general public can submit "word" nominations anytime before Jan. 6. Linguist Ben Zimmer talks to Renee ...

Defeating the words "junk" and "WikiLeaks," the word "app" was picked as the 2010 word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Short for "application," "app" received 69 votes from the linguists ...

The American Dialect Society has named “because” its word of the year for 2013. What makes because special is its evolving usage. Where once “because” needed to be followed by “of” or a full clause, ...

This year, the American Dialect Society made news by announcing that the singular "they" was their word of the year, and now The Comma Queen over at The New Yorker has a video discussing that decision ...