Sarah Palin`s `refudiate` named `Word of the Year`

Washington: "Refudiate", a word coined by glamorous US politician Sarah Palin, has been named 2010`s `Word of the Year` by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

46-year-old Palin introduced the term into US lexicon last July when she used it in a tweet about a proposed Islamic cultural centre near World Trade Center site in New York city. "Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn`t it stab you in heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate," the former Alaskan governor posted on Twitter. The message was removed from her Twitter page shortly after its posting, but Palin defended her usage of "refudiate" in another Tweet: "`Refudiate`, `misunderestimate`, `wee-wee`d up`. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!" And, now the Oxford University Press has defined the word refudiate as a verb "used loosely to mean `reject`." Its blog says: "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used `refudiate`, we`ve concluded that neither `refute` nor `repudiate` seems consistently precise, and that `refudiate` more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of `reject`." It may be mentioned that according to the `Huffington Post`, the term became one of the most-searched words on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary over the summer. It was also named number four top word of 2010 by Global Language Monitor. -PTI