American Dialect Society

The American Dialect Society (ADS), "dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it", was founded in 1889 to create an American dialect dictionary along the lines of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1896). Its members are "linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, historians, grammarians, academics, editors, writers, and independent scholars in the fields of English, foreign languages, and other disciplines". Its publications include American Speech, a quarterly journal founded in 1925, and it sponsors the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Since 1990, the Society has published a Word of the Year. The Society itself claims that the "vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere" and "the only one not tied to commercial interests..." Nominations can include "multi-word compounds or phrases that act as stand-alone lexical items", or, more loosely, any “vocabulary item” or "Lexical Entity", as was the case for the 1998 winner, e-.

The unique concatenation of circumstances at the beginning of January 2000 meant that, as well as the traditional Word of the Year 1999 (Y2K) and Word of the 1990s Decade (web), there were also votes for Word of the Twentieth Century (jazz) and Word of the Past Millennium (she).

Words of the Year

 * 2007: subprime
 * 2008: bailout
 * 2009: tweet (noun & verb)
 * 2010: app
 * 2011: occupy

Word of the Decade

 * 2000-2009: web

Word of the Century

 * 2000: jazz

Word of the Millennium

 * 2000: she