With excellent timing for citation in Microsoft’s lawsuit against Apple over the latter’s App Store trademark, the American Dialect Society has just declared the word “app” their word of the year.
Beating out words like “junk” (?), “WikiLeaks”, “trend” and “nom” (thank God), app was voted the belle of the Dialect Society ball by over 69 linguists. It was a close race, though, with the Dialect Society’s executive secretary saying that while there was nothing “clearly dominant” this year, “there’s no question ‘app’ is a very powerful word.”
A few other Apple-related words also made the American Dialect Society’s list, including “fat-finger” to mean mistyping on a touchscreen and the “-pad” suffix in reference to tablet computers.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
