In the News

Reprinted with permission from The San Francisco Chronicle
Online Dictionary Releases Top 10 Words of 2000

In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word Was 'Chad'

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December 26, 2000, DANVILLE, California (CNN) - Among the thousands of words spelled and spoken in this nearly departed year 2000, the most celebrated amounts to a tiny bit of paper, according to the online Internet site yourDictionary.com.

After endless weeks of reading and hearing about the presidential election in Florida, the word seemed inescapable: chad. It's that little paper square that pops out when a voter punches the ballot card and casts a vote for president.

Chad - it's not just an African country, the nation learned.

With the year winding down, officials at yourDictionary.com thought you'd like to know their choice for the year's top words, as well as the biggest corporate buzzwords and worn-out cliches.

Linguistic specialists at yourDictionary.com queried experts around the world to determine their rankings. The constantly evolving world of cyberspace is having a profound effect on the words we use, said Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief executive officer of yourDictionary.com.

"Due to the spread of the Internet, language is evolving at an ever faster rate," said Payack. "Our lists attempt to capture that evolution and innovations in word choice and usage."

Originally a research tool for the world's linguistic community, yourDictionary.com was re-launched as a commercial site this year. More than 1 million people a month visit yourDictionary.com, according to Payack.

Babble of our times
With chad as king, here are the top, and maybe the most worn out, words of 2000. Payack and Robert Beard, chief linguistics officer of yourDictionary.com also offer some commentary.

• Millennium: No staying power; actually the Top Word of 1999
• Y2K: Ditto
• Sydney Olympics: The two names were interchangeable
• Dot-com: Momentum from 1999; ensuing economic crash only emphasized the word
• Elian: Remember the Cuban kid plucked from the sea whose custody case became a cause celebre?
• God: Frequently invoked through the presidential campaign season thanks to candidates Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush
• Pelletizing: At the crux of the Bridgestone/Firestone tire recall, the process of bonding the rubber with the steel belted radials
• Intifada: A shorthand reference to a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians that escalated in late September
• Tiger: As in Tiger Woods, who set the golfing world afire with irons and drivers

Biz buzz
What's business without buzzwords? For yourDictionary.com, the five stand-out acronyms and their translations:

• B2B: Business-to-business
• B2C: Business-to-consumer
• ASP: Application service provider
• SSP: Software service provider
• CRM: Customer relationship management

A language all their own
As the Internet gained a greater global presence in communications, users continued to popularize their own lingo.

The top Internet words of 2000:

• Eyeballs: A visitor to a Web site
• Stickiness: The amount of time a visitor stays on a Web site
• Click-through: Clicking on a banner ad on a Web site
• Click-and-mortar: What dot-coms are attempting to become; a hybrid between a dot-com and a 'brick-and-mortar' (viz. profitable) operation
• Lay-offs: What happens when you don't succeed in transforming your dot-com into a click-and-mortar operation

Cliches: They're like beating a dead horse
Cliches, the bane of many a linguist, also had their place in the year 2000. Here are some of the most prominent, according to yourDictionary.com.

• Time to fish or cut bait: Traced to the 1600s; still incomprehensible
• Think outside the box: Once a bold entreaty to be different, this cliché today surely shows how inside the box you really are
• Pushing the envelope: A corruption of the U.S. test pilots' term for stretching the aerodynamic "envelope" as they passed through Mach 1 and beyond
• Starting from ground zero: Ground zero is the epicenter of a thermonuclear blast; most would agree that "square one" is a much better place from which to start