Enlarge / Not very popular, apparently. Clearly Merriam-Webster doesn’t do A/B tests. (credit: Merriam-Webster)

The full list, apparently counting 1,000-plus, was not published, but Merriam-Webster’s announcement page highlights quite a few terms that have become commonplace over the years at Ars. Obnoxious Web mainstays like “clickbait” and “listicle” now have their own official entries—not to be confused with “click fraud,” a decades-old practice that Merriam-Webster finally recognizes as of today. Other ancient tech terms that finally received dictionary recognition in 2017 include “open source,” “peer-to-peer,” “ping,” “rootkit,” “keylogger,” and “backward compatible.” (Perhaps you’d call it ironic that the dictionary’s entry for “NSFW” is absolutely safe to click on at work.)

The most topical tech term on this year’s list is arguably “net neutrality,” which Merriam-Webster defines as follows: “the idea, principle, or requirement that Internet service providers should or must treat all Internet data as the same regardless of its kind, source, or destination.” Like most words and phrases in Merriam-Webster’s database, it includes a context quote, which, weirdly, describes the term as hard-to-define: “…a philosophical contest that’s being fought under the banner of ‘net neutrality,’ a slogan that inspires rhetorical devotion but eludes precise definition. Broadly, it means everything on the Internet should be equally accessible—that the Internet should be a place where great ideas compete on equal terms with big money.”