64, 65. Friend as a Verb

How 'Friend' Became a Verb by Orson Scott Card

This article is a very interesting read, written by the author of the awesome book Ender's Game. In it he mentions how his father, a historian, once complained about the telephone because letters that people wrote to each other proved to be the best sources of information about the past. However, the internet came about not too long after this conversation. At first, there was not much to do on the internet. With email, though, we were writing letters again-- this time with almost instant responses. Most emails are saved (not always intentionally), and some day historians will use this as a source. It didn't take long though for the internet to "blow up" and soon  we started doing all of our shopping and communicating online. Because of social networking sites and forums, people are meeting and building relationships in new ways.

This is how friend became a verb.

According to dictionary.com, the history of the word is as follows:

friend O.E. freond , prp. of freogan  "to love, to favor," from P.Gmc.*frijojanan  "to love" (cf. O.N. frændi , O.Fris. friund , M.H.G. friunt ,Ger. Freund , Goth. frijonds  "friend," all alike from prp. forms).Related to O.E. freo  "free." Meaning "a Quaker" (a member of theSociety of Friends ) is from 1670s. Feond  ("fiend," originally"enemy") and freond  often were paired alliteratively in O.E.; bothare masculine agent nouns derived from prp. of verbs, but are notdirectly related to one another. Related: Friends . As a verb, in theFacebook sense, attested from 2005.

So apparently as old as the word friend is, it got an update. Around 2005, the definition was updated to include friend as a verb because of the rise in popularity of social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace. We often hear people say "Friend me" when they want to be added to their Facebook friends, or "Some weird guy tried to friend me last night." My favorite is hearing it in past tense-- "Yeah, I friended you yesterday!"

I wonder what words will get updated in the dictionary or added to it because of the internet and social networking sites.