Refudiate has been named the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 Word of the Year
I’ve posted about the word and its origin here.
refudiate verb used loosely to mean “reject”: she called on them to refudiate the proposal to build a mosque.
[origin — blend of refute and repudiate]
A cute piece of intellectual elitist narrative reinforcement rather than a genuine attempt at popular language study, as the list of other ‘finalists’ demonstrates.
Interestingly the OUP USA blog has a companion post which reveals that ‘refudiate’ has been used in a variety of situations over the past one hundred years, but has never become considered a real word in the sense of being included in dictionaries.
At least half of these would have far more penetration into public consciousness than their choice.
In alphabetical order, here are their top ten finalists for the 2010 Word of the Year.
Go to the blog for the meanings of any you’re not familiar with:
bankster
crowdsourcing
double-dip
gleek
nom nom
retweet
Tea Party
top kill
vuvuzela
webisode
PS. Can you guess which word my spell-check did not recognise prior to publishing this post?
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