Dutch publisher Van Dale has discovered the hard way that a public vote is not always a wise move. The company behind a line of popular dictionaries held an online poll to find the most popular word of the year, embarrassingly the term 'swaffelen', meaning 'swing your penis' came out on top.

'Swaffelen' received over 57 per cent of the popular vote. The word which literally means to swing your John Thomas and hit it off another object rose to notoriety earlier this year when a Dutch student 'swaffled' the Taj Mahal and then took the obligatory step of posting a video of the event on YouTube.

Second place in the online poll went to the verb 'wiien', which is Dutch for playing the Nintendo Wii. The two results suggest that the only people to take part in the vote were teenage boys. Nice work their fellas.