Word of the Year

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday reports that Merriam-Webster has the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary have identified infosnacking as their word-of-the-year for 2005.

The concept of infosnacking has developed in response to all-the-time broadband internet access. Office workers spend time goofing off on the internet stop what they are doing to infosnack--check a sports score, look up a headline, compare prices, write on their weblog, check their email, etc.

UPDATE: Merriam-Webster chooses its word-of-the-year based on the number of online look-ups a word receives on the company's homepage. Being chosen word-of-the-year does not guarantee that infosnacking will appear in the next edition of the dictionary; that distinction occurs only when the editors decide a word has wide enough currency.

The editors of Merriam-Webster have chosen the much more prosaic word integrity as their word of the year for 2005, based on users' online lookups of the word. nHumanities wonders why so many people didn't already know what integrity means.