W00t Is The Word Of The Year!

I'm very familiar and friendly with words. I've been a librarian for 8 years and I've seen how we abuse the language. It's a shame to think that 50-60 years ago people had a vocabulary of a much higher quality than us but so is the times. As a bonus for us, we have more words than they could have ever dreamed about, words like: Shizzle, Truthiness, and w00t.

Yes, w00t. Merriam-Webster dictionary has made it official. Is this the first word to consist of both letters and numbers? I can't think of another. Gamers of the world, put your hands together and give it up for yourselves! This is the first step in bring our l33t skillz to the top. Today Merriam-Webster, tomorrow the world!

"This year's winning word first 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," said the company. "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."

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

The wisdom of crowds: "w00t!" voted word of the year [via Arstechnica]