DALLAS, Dec 29, 2005/ FW/ --- Fashion writers had been using ‘geek chic’ for sometime since Miuccia Prada started ‘dressing’ the nerds of Silicon Valley with her Spring 2002 collection. This year, the dictionary finally caught up and made it an ‘official word’ albeit listed as a slang.

Considered a ‘noun’ and defined as ‘fashion designed for or worn by computer enthusiasts’ geek chic actually covers a lot of things from the high fashion presented on the catwalk to the sports gear like the Audex™ jacket which is a combination of Bluetooth Wireless technology from Motorola and Burton snowboarding gear, resulting in outerwear that acts as the control center for hands free communication and entertainment while on the slopes ... or wherever a consumer may go.

The ‘Atkins Diet’ also entered the dictionary in 2005, listed as a noun and defined as a popular weight-loss system based on a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet; also called ‘Atkins Nutritional Approach, Atkins’ with the etymology as ‘1972; popularized by Dr. Robert C. Atkins (1930-2003).’

Definitely a mainstream word, fashionistas have been on the ‘Atkins Diet’ for a long time even before it became a household world.

So, in the grand scheme of things, the fashion world might not be the center of the universe, yet its effect on popular culture is tremendous.

Other new words added are: brag book, cat-sit, dataveillance, ecoregion, fan fiction, Hawaiian pizza, intelligent design, job spill, kiteboarding, lifestyle office, menuboard, nanoscience, one-hit wonder, phishing, quirkyalone, repost, search engine optimization, TiVo, undertime, v-mail, water birth, xenology, yowzer and zafu.

"When emerging technologies or current events bring a word to our attention, its no surprise," said Brian Kariger, CEO of Lexico Publishing Group. "We want to learn about phishing, podcasting, levees, and pandemics because we hear about them in the news.”

Founded in 1995, the Lexico Publishing Group, LLC is a leading provider of online reference services, including Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Reference.com, and CleverKeys.

Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com combined to serve more than 19 million unique visitors in November 2005. The Word of the Day Mailing List has more than 845,000 subscribers.

A complete list of the most popular words searched and new words can be found at: www.dictionary.com/features/dictionaryalphabet2005.html