"Blog" Top Word of 2004

U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster Inc. announced on November 30 its "Words of the Year 2004" [1]. These are determined by the statistics of online lookups at the publisher's Web sites. The No.1 Word of the Year was:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

The other words in the top-ten list are as follows:

 2. incumbent
 3. electoral
 4. insurgent
 5. hurricane
 6. cicada
 7. peloton
 8. partisan
 9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

Eight entries among the top ten is related to major news events from the presidential election to natural phenomena.

How many of the above words do you know? Clicking these words at the Merriam-Webster OnLine site provides their definitions.

The year 2004 was just the year when I began to use blog sites.

1. Publisher: 'Blog' No. 1 word of the year, CNN.com (November 30, 2004).