Do you Twitter? If so you could be one of the people responsible for making Twitter the most used English word of 2009. Of the 1.58 billion English speakers in the world, it looks like, lots and lots of them use Twitter and in doing so they have made the brand-name more popular than the words: Obama, H1N1, Stimulus and 2.0 (the used and often abused suffix).
The list is compiled by the The Global Language Monitor who each year track the most popular words and phrases in the media and on the Internet (including blogs and social media sites). The most popular technology phrase for 2009 was “Cloud Computing” which came in at number 6 in the list of top 10 phrases. The most popular phrases of 2009 included “King of Pop”, “Swine Flu” and “Mayan Calendar” (which ends its cycle on 12/21/2012).
"In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words. Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters," said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor.
The most popular names of 2009 are, unsurprisingly, “Barack Obama” and “Michael Jackson” with the “Large Hadron Collider” coming in at number 4. So now that Twitter is a household name where is Google and the iPod? Interestingly enough Google features in the words of the decade along with Global Warming and 9/11 and iPod was the number one “Most Confusing (yet widely used) High Tech Buzzwords for 2007”, not because people didn’t recognise the brand, but no one knows what a ‘pod’ is (other than a collection of dolphins or where you find two peas) and how sticking an ‘i’ in front of it (like in iPhone and iMac) turns it into a music player!