13 January 2011
It has been less than a week, but Microsoft has used the American Dialect Society’s designation of app as the Word of the Year for 2010 as evidence in a trademark dispute with Apple. The latter company has attempted to trademark the term app store. Microsoft want to call its online retail outlets app stores as well and cites the ADS vote as an acknowledgment that the word is generic and thus ineligible to be trademarked. In a legal brief, Microsoft says:
Indeed, the arrival of app stores by Apple’s competitors was cited by the American Dialect Society as of the reasons it chose “app” as its Word of the Year for 2010, even though it
was not a new word. Linguist and American Dialect Society representative Ben Zimmer noted:App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle behind the slogan “There’s an app for that,” plus the arrival of “app stores” for a wide spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12 months.
The full legal brief can be found here. The quote is from page 14 of the brief (page 18 of the pdf).
(Hat tip: Ben Zimmer)
