Words such as Tweetup, staycation and jeggings provide a snapshot of Britain in the last year, according to dictionary expert Susie Dent.
The Countdown regular said language associated with the Twitter social networking site and the recession stood out in her scan of the Oxford English Corpus.
Ms Dent used the two billion-word database of contemporary language to pick out her words of the last year which she believed encapsulated the preoccupations and lifestyles of last year.
She said words such as Tweetup, which means meetings organised via the website, along with Facebook references like defriend, showed the influence of technology on vocabulary.
Staycation - to describe having a holiday at home rather than abroad - and the modern twist on a historic event, Great Recession, reflected the financial situation.
Ms Dent also singled out zombie bank - a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets but continues to operate because of government support.
In the world of fashion, leggings made of denim-look fabric led people to call them jeggings, prompting Ms Dent to add them to her list for the year.
But she said her favourite word was the advertising catchphrase of a Russian meerkat which made a surprising entrance into common usage.
Aleksandr's simples has become a modern phenomenon for people to describe something that is very easy to achieve.
Debt said: "The word of the year for many would probably be staycation: Few use it seriously, but it is a good example of how new words are coined to fit a changing environment - in this case a money-strapped one.
"Tweet (and the huge Twitter lexicon that has emerged, including the twitterati, Twitterverse and tweet-ups) is another strong candidate.
"I think my favourite, though, is probably simples, because it is proof of the dynamism of language as it is picked up through popular culture so that a word or expression is propelled into daily currency within weeks.
"We may not like it, and it may well not last, but it proves that English is moving quickly and is as robust as ever."
Words of the year
Bossnapping - noun:(in France) The prevention of senior managers from leaving company premises for a period of time by their employees, in order to protest about large-scale redundancies and cutbacks.
Zombie bank - noun: A financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support.
Geoengineering/ecohacking - noun:The deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.
Jeggings - plural noun:Close-fitting leggings made of fabric that resembles denim in appearance (from jeans + leggings).
Minute mentoring - noun: A system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.
Phantonym - noun: A word that looks as it if means one thing but in fact means something quite different (from phantom + antonym).
Tweetup - noun: A meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter.
Staycation - noun: A holiday spent in one's home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips.
Simples - exclamation: Used to say that something is very easy to achieve (from the "compare the meerkat" TV advert).
Great Recession - noun: Term for the current recession, modelled on the Great Depression.
Hashtag - noun: A # (hash) sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.
Freemium - noun: A business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features.
Paywall - noun: A way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers.
Unfriend/defriend - verb:To remove from one's "friends" list (eg on a social networking website)
Tag cloud - noun: A visual depiction of the word content of a website, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence of the words or tags depicted.
Slashdot effect - noun: The slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one.