"Plutoed" Chosen as the 2006 Word of the Year

The Associated Press reported on Sunday that "plutoed" was dubbed the 2006 Word of the Year by the America Dialect Society. The 117-year-old organization is comprised of linguists, grammarians, historians and other scholars. This is the 17th year of the awards.

To "pluto" is "to demote or devalue someone or something," which was derived from the incident last year where the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto didn't meet its definition of a planet.

In the final vote, "Plutoed" won "climate canary," defined as "an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon."

Other words that organization considered were:

-murse, man's purse
-flog, a fake blog that promotes products
- macaca, an American citizen treated as an alien

The ADS conducts this vote as just something fun, not in an official capacity to induct words into the English language.

Last year,the society chose "truthiness" as its top word last year, as word credited to Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert, who defined it as "truth that comes from the gut, not books."