Akademik

n.

A failed dot-com company. Also: dot bomb, dot.bomb, and .bomb.

"A guy I've known for years who recently left tobacco company R.J. Reynolds said an odd thing to me last week. He's about to roll his 401(k) assets into an IRA, where at last he'll have a pool of money to buy individual stocks. So what's the first thing he plans to buy? No dot bombs for him."

— Daniel Kadlec, "Down In Smoke," Time, February 12, 2000

"Certainly, as powerful a theme as the Internet is, the high-tech sector can't go up 70 percent forever," said Chris O'Keefe, director of research at Compu-Val Investments in Wilmington.

"I do think a few of these dot bombs are going to make big news next year," he said. "Quite a few of them are not going to make it."

—Bill Yingling, "Experts: Bull markets, bubble trouble ahead," News Journal, December 28, 1999

I am sure that I am not the first to tell you that investors will not endlessly provide these freewheeling e-commerce companies with unlimited and inexpensive capital resources. At that time many overvalued .coms will have outstanding potential to become .bombs.

—Mark Layton, ".coms or .bombs: Strategies for Profit in e-Business," Cornerstone Leadership Institute, September 17, 1999

I know, I know: I'm way behind the curve on this one. You could say that, what with the Nasdaq's spectacular melt-down and dot-com companies crashing like so many Windows machines, 2000 was the year of the dot bomb. The Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, magazines, and other media tells me that dot bomb was used exactly once in 1999, while the related phrases dot-bomb and dot.bomb were used twice and once, respectively. In 2000, however, these phrases were used in over 250 stories.