Gamers, rejoice! The quintessential l33t-speak shout — “w00t!” — has been named the “Word of the Year” by the Merriam-Webster Online Web site. In the somewhat dry language of the company’s press release, “w00t” is listed as an interjection, and defined as “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay.'”
According to the Merriam-Webster Web site, “w00t” is a transliteration derived an acronym for the phrase “We Owned the Other Team.” The innovative spelling, with two zeros in the middle, is derived from a hacker language known as “l33t,” in which numbers and symbols are substituted for letters they resemble.
“What’s interesting about the selection of w00t is that it is taking language in a new direction,” said John Morse, President and Publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., in the company’s press release. “Given the inefficiency of texting with a numeric keyboard, people look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A. This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character.”
Another explanation, according to some gaming Web sites, is that hackers began developing l33t as a way of making it harder to search for their bulletin board conversations online. Undoubtedly, however, the NSA is hard at work on a real-time l33t translator.
Regardless of exactly how “l33t” and “w00t” developed, it is a safe bet that somewhere, Noah Webster is smiling. In 1828, after more than two decades of work, Webster published “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” in which he himself revolutionized the spelling of many common words. Among other things, he dropped the “u” in words like “colour,” changed “centre” to “center” and “gaol” to “jail,” and added words that were uniquely American,…