According to the American Dialect Society, “hashtag” deserves top place as Word of the Year for 2012. It beat phrases like “Gangnam Style,” “YOLO” and “fiscal cliff,” among others.
A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #, a form of metadata tag. “This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” explained association member Ben Zimmer, also the language columnist at the Boston Globe. “In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”
As our worlds revolve around communication via the WWW our use of online words in our jargon is constant. Tweet being the word of 2010, and Google the word of the decade, the fact that hashtag has taken over 2012 is no surprise. What are your predictions for 2013?
[via Mashable]
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Saša Mitrović is a blogger. Follow her on Twitter at @thrasheddoll
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