W00t

Abstract

W00t is a contraction of an exclamation once popular in Dungeons & Dragons, Wow, Loot! , imported online by nostalgic gamers. W00t is a codeword for root, the privileged user account of a system administrator, in the jargon of old-school hackers. W00t is onomatopoeic, imitating the sounds made by video games or by Daffy Duck or by railroad trains. W00t is an acronym, standing for “We owned the other team” and also “Want one of those.” W00t originated in dance clubs, where rappers in the early 1990s inspired shouts of “Whoot, there it is!” W00t comes from the Arsenio Hall Show, the Wizard of Oz books, Pretty Woman, Bloom County. Or it may be an inversion of the old Scots negation hoot, or a perversion of woeten, ostensibly an antiquated Dutch greeting. The many contradictory etymologies of w00t, of which the above are only a sampling, have baffled journalists and addled lexicographers since at least 2007, when the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster announced that w00t was the Word of the Year. The term was chosen in a poll conducted on the Merriam-Webster website from a selection of the twenty most popular entries in the company’s user-generated Open Dictionary. In a public announcement the publisher was vague about the significance of the vote: “The word you’ve selected hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded—might just improve its chances.” And in interviews with the media the Merriam- Webster staff seemed befuddled by the choice. “This is a word that was made up, has no classical roots, but has lasted,” the editor at large Peter Sokolowski told Newsweek. “I can’t say that w00t will stick, but it does show that sense of adventure in language that young people have.” In the absence of more authoritative information about the meaning of the word or where it came from reporters cobbled together whatever origin stories they could from the vast repository of lore on Wikipedia, the Urban Dictionary, and the web.