The 2005 Word of the Year is....Podcast!

"Choosing the word of the year is incredibly difficult," said McKean. "Not just because of the enormous amount of data we look at-everything from blogs to technical journals to suggestions sent to dictionaries@oup.com, but because everyone has such strong opinions about what makes a word Word of the Year material."

Oxford University Press defines podcast as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player." While the Oxford definition would be considered incorrect by many podcasters, it reflects common usage without being overly technical.

"Podcast" will be added to the next online update of the New Oxford American Dictionary, due in early 2006.

Podcasting beat out several other words or phrases to be Word of the Year:

• bird flu (an often fatal flu virus of birds, esp. poultry, that is transmissible from them to humans, in whom it may also prove fatal)
• ICE (an entry stored in one's cellular phone that provides emergency contact information)
• IDP (internally displaced person; someone forced to relocate within a country because of a natural disaster or civil unrest)
• IED (improvised explosive device, such as a car bomb)
• lifehack (a more efficient or effective way of completing an everyday task: "I found a great lifehack for getting a cheap hotel room.")
• persistent vegetative state (a condition in which a patient recovering from a coma retains reflex responses and may appear wakeful, but has no cognitive functions or other evidence of cerebral cortical activity)
• reggaeton (a Latin American dance music which combines elements of reggae music with hip-hop and rap.)
• rootkit (software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files or system data.)
• squick (cause immediate and thorough revulsion: "was anyone else squicked by our waiter's piercings?")
• sudoku (a logic-based puzzle consisting of squares that form grids within a grid. Into each smaller grid, the numerals 1 through 9 are entered but not repeated, and they may not be repeated in any row or column of the larger grid.)
• trans fat (fat containing trans-fatty acids, considered unhealthier than other dietary fats.)

Source: Oxford University Press