ABCNEWS.com : Webster's Language for a New Generation Among the new words that made the cut for 2002 were treehugger (an environmentalist"), hottie ("a physically attractive person"), roadrage ("a motorist's uncontrolled anger that is usually generated by an irritating act of another motorist and is expressed by aggressive or violent behavior") and dollarization ("adoption of the U.S. dollar as a foreign country's official national currency").
"We added hottie, meaning somebody very attractive, and booty, meaning buttocks, and noogie, the prank of rubbing your knuckles on somebody's head," says James Lowe, a senior editor at Merriam-Webster.
The first great champion of American English, Noah Webster, believed that a great nation had to have its own language. He published the first genuinely American dictionary in 1806, which had 37,000 entries.