No matter whether they are online or not, we all use the famous Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Yet, not all of us are familiar with the word “w00t”, aren’t we?

But “w00t” is a winner! In fact it is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, so we should better search for its signification and keep it in mind! As probably some of us expected, Merriam-Webster’s announcement thrilled millions of hardcore online game enthusiasts, as “w00t” has to do with gaming.

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year represents a hybrid of letters and numbers that gamers use as an exclamation of happiness. When they win a battle, they destroy an enemy or conquer a new world, they all shout “w00t”!

Thus, “w00t” seems to be the new generation’s exclamation of happiness or triumph. Nowadays people are different from their ancestors, because they live in the new world they built, a world full of abstractions and brand new ways of entertainment, for example. But they are not substantially different from Middle Ages’ people, who were fighting their battles and conquering new lands and peoples.

We are still humans; we share the same feelings with our ancestors. The only thing that has substantially changed is the context, our lives’ symbolic framework. The fact that “w00t” was chosen Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year proves this theory. Man suffered all kind of transformations, but the most intense and interesting ones are those related to the symbolic world people have built for themselves. "It [“w00t”] shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," said Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse.

“w00t” is probably the most used word of the so-called “l33t speak”, how gamers call the more and more popular language they seem to have invented. According to John Morse, gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, creating this “l33t” speak, that is the “elite” speak.

Elite or not, gamers’ new language represents nothing else than the current world’s power of re-inventing everything, even language. This is what anthropology and semiotics may call evolution.

So, let us “w00t” of joy and fulfillment!