[Ads-l] WOTY 2015 nominations

[Hugo]

These are all based on words people have been talking about on Twitter
the past year, from 219,918 tweets. These are "new" in 2015, an
adjective, noun and verb:

 * lit / lit af
 * fam
 * slay

"Lit" is the surprise new entry. It's commonly used as "lit af", or
"lit as fuck", for example in this tweet: "My Year is starting off lit
af👌🏼 ...but is gonna be TD by Monday morning". Something, I'm not
sure what, happened in June 2015 that caused its use to explode on
Twitter.

"Fam" (from family, for those closest to you but not necessarily
family), has been around a while, became popular towards the end of
2014 and is still talked about.

Similarly, "slay" (UD: "killed it. succeeded in something amazing",
"something you tell someone when they look sexy as f***") grew towards
the end of 2014, peaking in April 2015.

Previous nominations "bae", "on fleek", "fuckboy" and "thot" had high
numbers for the start of 2015 but were lower towards the end. However,
"bae" is still divisive and at the top for all of 2015 by a big
margin; more than twice as much as the second placed "mines".

"Mines" itself deserves a brief mention: this is used in place of the
possessive "mine", for example: "Retweet that last retweet of mines
1,000 times !!!". This has had good numbers since I started mining
these tweets.

These are all sourced from analysis of three Twitter bots that have
been collecting words from Twitter since 2013. They've looked for
certain sentences and extracted the X.

 * @lovihatibot -- "I love/hate the word X"
 * @nixibot -- "X is not/isn't/ain't a word"
 * @favibot -- "X is my new favorite/favourite/fave word"

More info and numbers:
http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2016/01/twitter-woty-2015.html

Hugo

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org