WORDS OF THE YEAR. The hotly contested competitions for Word of the Year 2005 are well underway. So far, integrity, podcast, and infosnacking all lay claim to the title.

At MERRIAM-WEBSTER, the word of the year is based on the number of online lookups. The M-W Top Ten are as follows:

integrity
refugee
contempt
filibuster
insipid
tsunami
pandemic
conclave
levee
inept

According to the Merriam-Webster press release,

“Lookups for ‘integrity’ have steadily increased over the past few years, and this year it is clearly the most looked-up word,” said John M. Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster. “We’re not sure how to account for the increase in interest in this particular word, except that people do often look up the meanings of words that have special significance to current events and issues. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to think that recent political and social developments have made the word integrity particularly appropriate to issues that people are talking about.”

As has been the case in the past, many of the top ten words on Merriam-Webster’s 2005 list come directly from news media headlines. The biggest event-related word of the year and holder of the #2 spot is “refugee.” The ongoing conversation about the appropriateness of this word to describe people displaced by Hurricane Katrina made this the most heavily looked-up event-related word in the history of Merriam-Webster OnLine, outdoing the previous record-holder “tsunami” (#6) by a wide margin.

“Even reality television can have an impact on what words are looked up,” said Morse, “if the show if popular enough, and the moment is memorable enough. When Simon Cowell on American Idol said of Anthony Federov’s performance that it was ‘pleasant, safe, and a little insipid,’ it set off a round of lookups for insipid (#5) that kept that word in the Top Fifty for two months.”

At the NEW OXFORD AMERICAN DICTIONARY, the criteria seem to be that The Word must be "new" and "cool." This year's winner was

podcast

with the also-rans including

bird flu
ICE
IDP
IED
lifehack
persistent vegetative state
reggaeton
rootkit
squick
sudoku
trans fat

At WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD COLLEGE DICTIONARY, the Chosen Word is infosnacking. From the press release (as per City Pages):

A phenomenon that's taking place in offices all over the world now has a name.

The trappings of the Digital Age enable employees to do more than take traditional coffee breaks on company time. Checking e-mail, Googling sports scores, shopping online and surfing the latest headlines on the Internet have also become the norm during workers' office hours.

This is why the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary (with bonus CD-ROM) have selected "INFOSNACKING" as Word of the Year for 2005. The term colorfully conveys what employees with company Internet access are doing--in snack-attack fashion--while on the clock.

Of course, in New York City, it's called infonoshing. It's what you do on the Internosh.

Coming up early next year: Selections of the AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY!