Tuesday, Dec. 08, 2009
Unfriend (Verb)
The term used to describe the act of removing someone from a Facebook friend list was officially listed in the New Oxford American Dictionary on Nov. 17. Added to the dictionary, along with a number of technologically inspired terms such as hashtag (a Twitter term) and "sexting" (the sending of suggestive text messages), unfriend was also named Oxford's Word of the Year. Grammarians complain that the term should be defriend, not unfriend. Facebook's stance? "The folks at Oxford are the experts on language," they said in a statement to New York magazine. "We'll leave it up to them to decide."