I mentioned “w00t” in passing in my last post, but now it’s time to write more on “w00t.”

First of all, “w00t” is not a word. Woot may be a word, but “w00t” is not.

According to Wikipedia, woot goes all the way back to Middle English, where it meant “know.” Modern usage can be traced back to “whoot” or, alternatively, as an acronym for “We Own the Other Team.”

Where do the zeroes come in?

In “leet-speak” (a.k.a. “l33t-speak” or “1337-speak” and so on), numbers are used in place of letters. For example, “A” becomes “4″ and “O” becomes “0″ (A=4, B=8, E=3, G=6, O=0, T=7, and so on*).

Although some of the “leet” ciphers become words in and of themselves, for the most part, it is just a form of code to try to trip up outsiders or (as you may well recognize from your spambox) spam filters.

In other words, “w00t” is nothing more than “woot” in semi-coded form. Take away woot, and “w00t” has no meaning.

People may type “w00t” but that doesn’t change the fact that the word is “woot.” While people may have voted “w00t” as the word of the year, Merriam-Webster** should have known better than to present the word as “w00t” when it should have been presented as “woot.” Instead, they went for what is fanciful and “cool” instead of what is correct.

Or, should I have typed “‘c001′ 1ns734d 0f wh47 1s c0rr3c7″?

*Follow the link and you’ll see that some numbers can stand in for several letters, for example, “1″ can be I, L or T, and other characters can be used as well.

**If you’re using a Merriam-Webster dictionary, perhaps now would be a good time to consider investing in a dictionary from Oxford. You can subscribe to their Word of the Day RSS feed too.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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