While the 2009 Time magazine “Person of the Year” has been narrowed down to either Twitter or the economy (neither are people, you see), the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year has been decided. The winner? “Unfriend.”
Unfriend: v. To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year…Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”
