W00t! There It Is

For language buffs, what's surprising about w00t is that it hasn't followed a word's traditional path—being spoken first and written later. Take the word hello, for example. It began as an oral greeting over the telephone—a salutation for a person you couldn't see. Only after it was spoken orally did it get written down and added to the dictionary (in 1877, to be exact, says Sokolowski).

But w00t has done just the opposite: it started on the keyboard, made its way into SMS texting, then into writing, until it was finally spoken out loud. And perhaps that reflects a new direction in language, one being molded by a generation raised on the Internet, videogames and cell phone text messaging. "To google," after all, became a widely accepted verb virtually overnight. And even my fortysomething editors write e-mails with LOL. "This momentous selection is just another sign that the American lexicon is increasingly defined not by scholars but by raving lunatic bloggers like us," writes Jared, a blogger on Owenbloggers.com.

Of course, like all things to hit the mainstream, w00t's widespread recognition might just be the beginning of the end. True pioneers of its use say its popularity is, like, so 1995. "It's so old-school I don't even use it anymore," writes a blogger from Alaska. ThinkGeek, an online tech-gadget retailer, meanwhile, has been selling w00t! T-shirts since 2001; the fact that the phrase is only now making headlines, says Ty Liotta, one of its brains, is, well, a little less than cool. "Part of being geeky is that you want to be up on the latest technologies, and you want credit for using the latest terms. And then suddenly it hits mainstream and then the geeks and hackers are like, 'Oh, we hate it now'," he says. "So I'm not sure turning mainstream necessarily bodes well for w00t." Well, we can't all be chic geeks.

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