'Refudiate' Enters the Dictionary

After enduring waves of mockery, Sarah Palin's Twitter-inspired "refudiate"—a portmanteau of "refute and repudiate"—has become the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2010 Word of the Year. The dictionary's editors reviewed Palin's use of the word and "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.'" After first using "refudiate" on Twitter, Palin suggested she was following in Shakespeare's footsteps by coining her own vocabulary.