Excuse us while we do a little infosnacking

Copywriters, here’s a word to add to the repertoire: infosnacking. It means “checking e-mail, Googling sports scores, shopping online and surfing the latest headlines” while at work, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which has selected the term as its 2005 Word of the Year, despite its staggering lack of popularity. (It gets just 677 hits on Google this morning, and that includes a bunch of Word of the Year stories from this week.) “It hasn’t caught on yet,” says Webster’s editor in chief Mike Agnes. “We try to choose a word that tickles our linguistic funny bone or is significant in the way language reflects culture.” Using Factiva.com, we find the earliest mention of the word in a Billboard story from November 2004. It’s described there as a word used within AOL to describe the kinds of experiences the company wants to offer its subscribers—“small, quickly digestible “snacks” of entertainment and information distributed through instant messaging, e-mail and other electronic platforms.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

December 13, 2005 | Permalink