Word of the Year for Elementary Students

[AAllan at AOL.COM]

Dear Roberta,
  Thanks for your message! Here is the explanation.
  In 1990 the American Dialect Society began choosing words of the year,
looking back on the year gone by. You can find a complete list of our choices
at our website,

http://americandialect.org/woty.html

We will choose words for 2002 at our meeting Januray 3, 2003. Look for an
announcement on our website soon after that.

For earlier years, you were able to find words because of a book I wrote with
David Barnhart, now available in paperback:

America in So Many Words by Allan Metcalf and David Barnhart. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1999. ISBN 0-618-00270-7.

This goes back to the first English-speaking settlements in North America and
has a word for almost every year since then. It not only tells the word but
tells its story, and tells why we chose that word for that year. You can
order the book from your local bookstore or an online bookseller.

If you go to amazon.com, you can see the full index, which lists all our
choices of words of the year from the 1600s to the end of the 20th century.

- Allan Metcalf