Corante

Authors

Clay Shirky
( Archive | Home )

Liz Lawley
( Archive | Home )

Ross Mayfield
( Archive | Home )

Sébastien Paquet
( Archive | Home )

David Weinberger
( Archive | Home )

danah boyd
( Archive | Home )

Guest Authors
Site Search
Monthly Archives
Syndication
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0
Check out Jevon MacDonald on the "uncertain future of blogging"

Many-to-Many

« Jigsaw Contact Market | Main | "You don't know me, but...": How did I miss this? »

December 10, 2004

Weight of Words

Email This Entry

Posted by Ross Mayfield

The 10 ten words of the year according to Merriam-Webster, based on lookups: with del.icio.us and Flickr tags.  Also links to currently blank wiki pages and Wikipedia articles.

1. blog: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
2. incumbent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

3. electoral: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

4. insurgent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

5. hurricane: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

6. cicada: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

7. peloton: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

8. partisan: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

9. sovereignty: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

10. defenestration: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

These are, of course, very different from the most popular tags.  I would love to see a visualization of the relative weight of these words.

Comments (2) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: social software


COMMENTS

1. Alex Halavais on December 10, 2004 4:14 PM writes...

I get most of those. But "defenestration"? Was there a particularly famous defenestration this year? Or are sales of "Gravity's Rainbow" up? (It was GR, yes?) Or is it just a word people look up when they are trying out an online dictionary for the first time?

Permalink to Comment

2. Andy on December 10, 2004 4:56 PM writes...

It's used in deliberately obscure help manuals for what are meant to be intuitive interfaces, to mean "move it out of the window". Click my name for words of the year over the last 100 years according to Oxford Dictionaries.

Permalink to Comment

TRACKBACKS

TrackBack URL:
http://www.corante.com/cgi-bin/mt/teriore.fcgi/1773.

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Weight of Words:


EMAIL THIS ENTRY TO A FRIEND

Email this entry to:

Your email address:

Message (optional):




RELATED ENTRIES
Spolsky on Blog Comments: Scale matters
"The internet's output is data, but its product is freedom"
Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites
knowledge access as a public good
viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Gorman, redux: The Siren Song of the Internet
Mis-understanding Fred Wilson's 'Age and Entrepreneurship' argument
The Future Belongs to Those Who Take The Present For Granted: A return to Fred Wilson's "age question"