The process for picking the Words of the Year this year was a little different from preceding years. This year, instead of looking to our lists of most frequently looked-up words, we asked our users to vote for the word that most aptly summed up the year. Truthiness won by a wide margin, followed by google, decider, and war.

Here's the interesting part: the word that people looked up most often after the announcement was, far and away, the Number 2 word, google. The ongoing high level of interest in google is striking and inspires us to retell the story of its homophonic cousin googol in this month's Word History of the Month.

The Number 3 word of the Words of the Year, decider, didn't quite make the Top Twenty but nearly did, coming in 25th among the most frequently looked up this month. Oddly, the only other word from the Words of the Year list to make this month's list was quagmire, a word that has been slipping on and off the list of most frequently looked-up words for the past few years.

In other comings and goings on the list, aloof, empathy, and aphorism, among the most frequently looked-up in October, fell off the list in December. In addition to quagmire, returns to the list this month include two old friends facetious and conundrum.