The English lexicon has officially grown by one with Oxford University Press nominating “unfriend” as the 2009 word of the year.

Your mum may bemoan the effects that SMS messages and 140-character Tweets are having on your everyday ability to communicate properly, but geek speak has now been ratified.

OUP has defined unfriend as: verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

It can only be a matter of time before 1337 or “leetspeak” makes it way into primary school study guides so we can all pwn teh n00bs- w00t!

A number of other word finalists also came from the tech world including:

hashtag – a # added to a word or phrase allowing Twitter users to search for tweets that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because of texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small  portable laptop with limited memory

paywall –  blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone, ooh er!