Posted 05/12/09 at 07:32:03 AM by Paul Lilly

Last year several geek-inspired words made it into the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, including 'webinar', 'netroots', 'pretexting', 'fanboy', and 'malware'. Whether Merriam-Webster choose to recognize it or not, 'noob' might soon become a real English term as well, as determined by the Global Language Monitor (GLM).

"The widespread popularity of English as a second language in Asia has brought about the most fertile period of word generation since William Shakespeare's time with new terms coined on average every 98 minutes, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports.

It takes using a word 25,000 times by media outlets and social networking sites for the GLM to acknowledge it, and the race is on to become the one millionth English word. Other possible entries include 'defollow,' 'defriend,' 'greenwashing,' 'and chiconomics.'

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Posted 01/07/09 at 09:22:09 AM by Pulkit Chandna

A hacker who uses the pseudonym GMZ accepted responsibility for the recent Twitter hack in an IM interview to Threat Level on Tuesday. He divulged little personal details except that he is an 18-year old student on the East Coast. It is also known that he is a member of the online forum for hackers called Digital Gangster; forum members had claimed that GMZ was responsible for the hack even before the hacker owned up.

He revealed that he successfully gained access to the account of a female Twitter staffer named “Crystal.” He had serendipitously stumbled upon her account and had no idea that she was a Twitter staff member with administrative control. He then proceeded to hack her account using a dictionary attack.

The program didn’t have to break a sweat as she was using the password “happiness.” Her flimsy password coupled with Twitter’s primeval security, which allows rapid-fire log-in attempts, led to several high profile Twitter accounts, including the ones belonging to President-elect Barack Obama and Fox News, being compromised.

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Posted 07/08/08 at 02:50:22 PM by Paul Lilly

"At one point during the webinar, 'W00ts!' were heard emanating from the conference room as Harry, a renowned Team Fortress 2 fanboy, demonstrated how to properly tea-bag an opponent."

Most English teachers would have a field day with the above sentence, but with the exception of 'tea-bag,' the rest of the terms are now officially recognized. Perhaps Merriam-Webster is undergoing a mid-life crisis, or maybe as geeks we've leveled up our ability to affect the English language. Either way, a bevy of new terms are being added to the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, and many of them could be pulled straight out of any computer forum. Among the new terms are:

• webinar
• netroots
• pretexting
• fanboy
• malware 

Not all the new words are technology terms, but many of them do reflect societal trends. "As soon as we see the word used without explanation or translation or gloss, we consider it a naturalized citizen of the English language," explained Peter Sokolowoski, an editor-at-large for Merriam Webster.

Find how how you can further influence Merriam-Webster after the jump.

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