In a companion vote, sibling organization the American Name Society voted Pluto as Name of the Year for 2006. Macaca was runner-up.

Word of the Year: to pluto/be plutoed: to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet. Others in contest:

• murse: man’s purse

• surge: increase in troops 

• climate canary: 

• prohibited liquids:

• flog: a blog that flacks product

• YouTube

• macaca/macaca moment

Most Useful: climate canary: an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon. Others in contest:

• data Valdez: an accidental release of a large quantity of private or privileged information.

• flog: a fake blog created by a corporation to promote a product or a television show. 

• sharrow: an arrow-like design painted on a roadway to mark a bicycling route. 

• boomeritis: afflictions or injuries of Baby Boomers, caused by their age.

Most Likely to Succeed: YouTube: as a verb, to use the YouTube web site or to have a video of one’s self be posted on the site.  Others in contest:

• carbon: in combining forms about reducing waste emissions, used as shorthand for air pollution. 

• the decider: with the definite article, a person who makes decisions for other decisionmakers, as spoken by President George W. Bush. 

• macaca moment: an ethnic or racial gaffe caught on video. 

• m-, man-, men- as “man-fixes” in compounds and blends such as moobs, manboobs, murse, man purse, mancation, man crush, manmaries, menaissance, etc.