In an annual announcement as highly anticipated (in some circles) as Cosmo’s Bachelor of the Year and Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive, the lexicographers at the New Oxford American Dictionary have proclaimed the Word of the Year for 2006. And we science types are swooning. The winner is “carbon neutral.”

The competition was stiff (“dwarf planet”: Pluto’s lowly new designation) and also not (“elbow bump”: the World Health Organization’s recommended greeting for avoiding avian flu). But in the end, carbon neutral—which means offsetting any carbon emissions that can’t be eliminated by investing in reforestation or purchasing solar or wind energy credits—seems like a no-brainer.

Editor-in-Chief Erin McKean wrote in Oxford’s blog that the ideal winner is “a word that we think will only become more used and more useful as time goes on.” That should certainly be the case for this word—or at least we hope so. The Earth Policy Institute recently announced that carbon emissions, the primary driver of global warming, hit a record high of 7.9 billion tons in 2005. That’s higher than anytime in the past 600,000 years, and probably the past 20 million.

Unless carbon neutral really becomes a part of the national (and global) lexicon, carbon dioxide levels will double by the end of the century. Fortunately, there are quite a few promising examples of the term already being put to good use.

Entities from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and banking giant HSBC to the city of Newcastle in Scotland have pledged to go carbon neutral. The organizers of the most recent Superbowl, World Cup and Winter Olympics all offset the emissions associated with those events. And this month, Silverjet, a British airline, added a mandatory carbon offset contribution to the price of all its tickets.

And in case you thought you were being left out of the action (or off the hook), there are online carbon calculators that will allow you to crunch—and offset—the emissions created by your daily activity, travel or business. Also, if you’re considering investing in energy efficient devices, you can calculate how much money you’ll save and pollution you’ll prevent here.

Or, if you’ve really got a lot of time on your hands, you can spend some time looking for the one word that will never win top honor in the dictionary’s next edition. —Jennifer Bogo