This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (‘leet,’ or ‘elite’) speak-an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters…
Although the double ‘o’ in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for ‘we owned the other team’—again stemming from the gaming community.
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007
Vía: Ars Technica
