"W00t," an exclamation of joy or excitement used by online gamers and hardcore Internet chat enthusiasts, is the word that best sums up 2007, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The word took the Word of the Year prize in Merriam-Webster's annual poll of favorite new terms such as "facebook," a verb that means to look up someone's profile on the popular online social networking site Facebook, and "blamestorm," to hold a meeting in order to find out who to blame.

W00t originated from a language called l33tspeak, or leetspeak after "elite", used by computer programmers in which letters are replaced by numbers. W00t was originally spelled as "w007," according to the the programming language's rules that uses the number "7" for the letter " t."

"It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," Merriam-Webster's president John Morse told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

Previous winners of the poll include "truthiness," a word used by political satirist Stephen Colbert to refer to truth that comes from the gut, and "google," to use the popular search engine to obtain information from the Internet.