Ten most 'hated' words on the Net

"Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published recently.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

"Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or Internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth.

"Cookie", a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth. The other two words in the top ten are "Vlog" and "social networking."

British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement.

Earlier this month, the growing use of words inspired by cyberspace was highlighted when the Collins English Dictionary announced that a string of them would be included in their ninth edition.

These included "me-media", a term for personal content websites such as Facebook, and "godcast", a religious service which has been converted to an MP3 format.

The dictionary’s compilers monitor the use of English through a 2.5 billion word database of websites, magazines, books, journals, newspapers and broadcast transcripts to help them decide if new words should be included.