Want to be hip?

"Infosnacking." Is it:

a. The nutritional information on a bag of potato chips?

b. New geek slang for channel-surfing with a remote?

c. An obscure word for Web-surfing and wasting time at work?

d. The Word of the Year?

Say what? Webster's New World College Dictionary has anointed infosnacking as its 2005 Word of the Year, despite its near-total absence from everyday use. Has it been in The New York Times? Nope. On CNN? Apparently not. Popular slang? Have you ever heard it, or used it?

"It hasn't caught on yet," admitted Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's. But the word of the year isn't about popularity, he explains; there aren't even any plans to add it to the dictionary.

"We try to choose a word that tickles our linguistic funny bone or is significant in the way language reflects culture," Agnes said.

Meanwhile, the New Oxford American Dictionary has its own word of the year and selected "podcasting." As of Thursday, "infosnacking" was getting 637 hits on Google, and "podcasting" was getting more than 35 million. So if it's a popularity contest, it's pretty clear who wins.

"We argue a lot" about choosing a word of the year, said Erin McKean, editor of the Oxford. "There's no hard-and-fast way of measuring this. We look for newness, usefulness, and what was going on in the world at the time."

Asked about infosnacking, McKean said she'd heard of it, but it was never under consideration by Oxford.

Infosnacking, by the way, means "checking e-mail, Googling sports scores, shopping online and surfing the latest headlines" while at work, according to Webster's.