“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008.  It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.

The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004.  That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.”  The power of the internet is on display.

The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio.  Can a video podcaster get a little love?  I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.

I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog.   Ain’t Twitter great?  It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter.  Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day.  I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”