Unfriend: Oxford USA's Word of the Year for 2009

The season of dubious annual honors is upon us, and blogs will soon be clogged with top-ten lists of the best and worst of the year: books, movies, iPhone apps, national health-care plans, excessively mourned celebrities, and--who knows--maybe presidential birthplace conspiracies.

Exercises in silliness? Of course. Shameless marketing schemes meant to stir up heated, meaningless debates? Definitely. Far too trivial for us to bother with? Well, sure--that is, unless the schemes have something to do with the English language.

For that reason alone I feel compelled to pass along the news that on Monday the editors of The New Oxford American Dictionary announced--without a trace of embarrassment--that Oxford's Word of the Year for 2009 is . . . unfriend:

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal."
(OUP Blog, Oxford University Press USA)

"Lex-appeal," maybe--but unfriend is not exactly a neologism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (or as some might say, the real OED), the noun unfriend dates back to Middle English: "a person who is not a friend or on friendly terms; an enemy."

Among countless other places, it shows up in Swinburne's play Bothwell ("With God to friend or unfriend, quick or dead"), Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped ("I am no unfriend to plainness"), and Kipling's novel Kim ("They were unfriends of mine"). In his 1961 autobiography, Headlines All My Life, British journalist Arthur Christiansen insisted that "'Unfriend' is a fine word (it means, I was told, just something short of 'Public Enemy')."

So rather than describe unfriend as a new word, it would be more accurate to say that it has undergone a conversion (from one part of speech to another)--an experience also known, more painfully, as a functional shift.

In any case, you may choose to follow the advice of my third-grade teacher: "Use this word in a sentence three times, and make it your own."

Or you might prefer to dip into Oxford's list of runners-up and pick an alternative nonce word or blend:

• funemployed: taking advantage of one's newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests


• tramp stamp: a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman


• choice mom: a person who chooses to be a single mother


• intexticated: distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle


• sexting: the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone


• birther: a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama's birth certificate


• deleb: a dead celebrity

Stay tuned: in a week or so, Merriam-Webster will be announcing its word of the year. Until then, let's try to curb our unbridled cynicism.

More Words About Words:

• The American Dialect Society's Words of the Year
• 200 Words and Expressions That Tick You Off
• Store Name Puns

Image: The New Oxford American Dictionary, second edition, 2005