Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster has its "Word of the Year," picked by an overwhelming 5-to-1 vote on its Web site: "truthiness," a noun. "Truthiness," coined by Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert, won Merriam-Webster's "No. 1 Word of the Year for 2006" based on votes from visitors to the publisher's Web site. Advertisement Honored earlier this year by "Time" magazine as one of the most influential people of 2006, Colbert, host of "The Colbert Report," first used "truthiness" on the "The Word" segment of his popular Comedy Central show back in October 2005. Soon after, Merriam-Webster reported on its Web site Saturday, the word was chosen as the 16th annual "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. The society defined it as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." Colbert himself says the word means "truth that comes from the gut, not books."
