w00t! meaning “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay.’” (You’ll often see people use the word ‘yeah’ for ‘yay’ but that is incorrect.)
Merriam-Webster (the only dictionary IMHO) has announced that w00t! is, indeed, its 2007 word of the year. Though they haven’t made it an “official” part of their dictionary, word has it that it has a good chance of making it in the near future.
According to M-W.com, the expression “became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (leet or elite) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double ‘o’ in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for we owned the other team—again stemming from the gaming community.
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Jan
cool. as a wordsmith and avid Scrabble player, I’m always wanting to be up on new words!
I’m going to test it out on my teenagers later–I’ll let you know what they think.
Yes, please do!
M-W.com is one of my favorite Web sites, but somehow I had missed that “woot” was featured. How fun!