Oxford Word of the Year

The Oxford American Dictionary has announced that "podcast" is its word of the year for 2005. It will be interesting to see where this word is in another year, or 5 or 10 years. It will be in the dictionary next year; at the moment, when I do an all-dictionary search (onelook.com), it shows up in no dictionaries at all. Might be worth it to keep returning to that search to see when it shows up in the various dictionaries.

Also-rans for the year include "bird flu", which has appeared in the daily paper and radio newscasts about 523 times a day for most of the year, and "sudoku", of which I had never heard until the San Jose Mercury News abruptly started including a sudoku puzzle on its puzzle page, oh, maybe a couple of months ago? I'm a word person, not a number person, so I've been pointedly ignoring it.

However, I did just now discover that you can do interactive crosswords here courtesy of the Merc.

Updates, July 2019:

• podcast: Pretty much everyone now knows what a podcast is and pretty much everyone seems to do them from time to time. (I might be exaggerating on the latter part.)  Many dictionaries now list the word.
• bird flu: also appears in many dictionaries. This year, however, the world has been turned topsy turvy in no uncertain terms by a phrase, "novel coronavirus," and a word, "COVID-19", that no one had ever heard of before (so, "coronoviruses" have been around for a while, but most people wouldn't have heard the term; and the novel coronavirus COVID-19 simply didn't exist before Dec 2019, and now it has wreaked havoc with the world economy, changed the way people live their lives, and sickened and killed millions worldwide. Want to bet these will possibly be the next word of the year? Or "social distancing"? So, bird flu? Pfft. Old story.
• sudoku: Yeah, I've been doing these off and on for many years now. You can often find more Sudoku puzzle books in the magazine section than you can find crossword puzzle books, which astonishes me no end.