Bangalore: ‘Hashtag’ has been crowned by the American Dialect Society as the #Word of the Year 2012, beating much loved words like ‘Gangnam Style’ , ‘YOLO’ (You Only Live Once) and ‘fiscal cliff’. According to the Daily Mail report, the word has had its existence around for decades, but the linguistic traditionalists decided to put forth its influence this year.

“This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk”, stated Ben Zimmer, the chair of the New Words Committee. He also added, “Hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop-culture.”

At the outset, Hashtag became popular in the Twittersphere where users would put it within tweets to make a larger comment or joke which resulted in spreading of the word to Facebook and everyday speech. Apart from that, the word gained reputation where the cover of the Newsweek magazine’s final print issue consisted of three words preceded by hashtag, #LastPrintIssue which made its cross over from web to print complete.

Earlier, other Internet terms such as “Tweet”, was declared as word of the year by the Language Group, while “Google” was named as word of the decade.

Other prominent words that failed to top the position include “Gate Lice” (Winner of the Most Creative) and “Binders” (Winner of Election Words), a term used by Romney to describe the resumes of female job candidates.

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