SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Ask John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, to name the word that defines the close of the millennium, and he doesn't hesitate: Internet.

"No other word has become part of people's lives so quickly or has had such an impact," he says.

The Internet has swept into the American vocabulary and spawned so many new words — netizen, chat room and home page, just to name a few — that it has come to represent a time in the nation's social history, he says.

And remarkably, the Internet has managed to become the most significant word of the century in less than a decade.

"We first started seeing a number of citations in 1994, and by 1998 it was established in the dictionary," Morse says. "It was just astounding."

No other new word has gained such widespread acceptance so quickly, he says.

Just a century ago, another form of communication swept into the language. In the 1898 edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the hot new word was telephone.

"It brought massive social change and reshaped the way people did business, just as the Internet is doing today," Morse says.

Telephone was no easy linguistic act to follow. It helped spawn a wide range of new words and phrases — busy signals, wrong numbers, voice mail, cell phones. It also gave America its standard greeting: Hello.

But Internet is holding its own, in part by borrowing words from an older technology and giving them new meaning, such as bookmark, address, copy and browser.

"That's how the vocabulary evolves," Morse says. "It's human nature to make the concepts easier to understand by using a familiar — in this case — print-based metaphor."

Allan Metcalf, a professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., helps put together a list of words of the year for the American Dialect Society. He says the word Internet is a strong candidate to define the end of the century, but he has another preference: words with the prefix e-, as in e-mail or e-commerce.

"It has a little more punch, and it goes beyond the thing to convey the attitudes and a mindset," Metcalf says. He also likes the word teenager, which came into use in the 1930s.

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At Merriam, new words earn a place in the dictionary simply by repeated use in the popular press. Merriam's lexicographers spend a large part of their day reading newspapers, magazines and now Internet publications. They look through everything from Sports Illustrated to The Wall Street Journal to Wired for words that might merit a citation.

Each new word and usage — along with a clipping from the publication showing how it was used — goes into an electronic database that is supplanting the Springfield-based industry leader's massive card files.

A new word must amass enough citations to indicate its acceptance by the American people before it goes into the dictionary.

"We are constantly charging and renewing our language and that is why it is so robust," Morse says. "Humans never stay in traditional grooves."

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