Twitter named top word of 2009
Twitter has attracted thousands of members and plenty of attention since its 2006 launch
Twitter has been voted the top word of 2009.
The name of the micro-blogging and social networking site proved more popular than Obama and H1N1 in a list compiled by Global Language Monitor, a company which monitors the internet and various other media forms to see how many times certain topics come up.
Other popular words included terms linked to the global economic downturn such as stimulus and deficit, while the top 15 included Hadron, due to the Large Hadron Collider experiment and vampire, which could owe its entry to the popular Twilight films and books.
Paul Payack, founder of Global Language Monitor, said: "In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words."
Other research by the firm highlighted that top phrases of 2009 were King of Pop and Obama-mania, while Barack Obama and Michael Jackson were the top names of the year.
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