American Dialect Society Selects "Hashtag" as 2012 Word of the Year
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - 2:45pm
In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase.
Presiding at the Jan. 4 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.
The American Dialect Society holds its (ADS) annual meetings concurrently with those of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).