Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.

Over the past 11 months, "Twitter" has been the most popular word in the English language.

The Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based group that tracks and analyzes trends in linguistics, counted the number of times various words appeared in the media or on the Internet. "Twitter" was the most successful at infiltrating the public discourse; "Obama" came in second; and "H1N1," "stimulus," "vampire," "2.0," rounded out the top five.

"Barack Obama" topped "Michael Jackson" for the most ubiquitous name of 2009; however, "The King of Pop" edged out "Obama-mania" for the year's most popular phrase.

It probably says something about the way our language is evolving that a microblogging service that limits the number of words with which we can communicate was found to be the year's most-used word. (And even with all that free advertising, no one has figured out how to monetize the thing.)