So, Merriam-Webster held a poll inviting visitors to its website to vote for the word of 2007. The winner? “w00t.” That’s right, 2007 is the year that l337speak hit mainstream. “w00t”, in case you’re not among the “leet,” is an interjection of happiness, like “yay” or “hurrah.” It’s most often used by geeks and gamers.

Luke Plunkett from Kotaku opines:

If w00t best sums up 2007, 2007 must be destroyed. Right away.

Personally, I say we wait eighteen, or heck nineteen days and then destroy 2007.

My favorite comment on the matter, however, came from Merriam-Webster President John Morse:

Morse said “w00t” reflected the growing use of numeric keyboards to type words. “People look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A,” he said. “This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Explain to me how substituting a number is more efficient than just using the letter. It can’t possible be more efficient: it uses the same amount of character (i.e., a 1:1 substitution) and you have to reconfigure your brain to both type and read it.

Language changes constantly: new words and spellings evolve, disappear, and transmute over time, so I can’t object to the inclusion of hacker-speak into our popular lexicon (some would argue that it’s already started to infiltrate the mainstream via text messaging lingo, but whether that’s a parallel evolution predominantly informed by the limited amount of space the medium affords or an offshoot of leetspeak is probably open for debate). I know plenty of those—and have been known myself—to utter “w00t” aloud in a particularly joyous moment, though I feel that its use among many groups (particularly older groups) has taken on a more ironic tone.

From a linguistic perspective, I find hacker speak fascinating; it’s not quite a language game, since it’s a written system not a spoken one, nor is it quite a cipher. Wikipedia describes leet as an argot, and, as usual, has a fascinating amount of documentation on the subject.

One thing’s for sure, though. I imagine this’ll be good news for Woot.