What word sums up the year 2009?
How about “unfriend?”
That’s the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year. It means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.
Each year Oxford University Press tracks how the English language is changing and chooses a word that best reflects the mood of the year.
Oxford lexicographer Christine Lindberg says “unfriend” has “real lex-appeal.”
Finalists for 2009 also included “netbook,” a small laptop, and “sexting,” the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cell phone.