Plutoed.

Astronomers discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930. But that's not exactly how the story begins; we must go back in time, to the 1920s.

Clyde Tombaugh, a 20-year-old Kansas farmer, was busy designing telescopes in his spare time, whetting and shaping lenses and mirrors by hand. He used to point his telescope to the heavens and make drawings of planets. So when Tombaugh learned that the Lowell Observatory in Arizona was working on planetary astronomy, he sent his pictures of Mars and Jupiter to the scientists working there. The astronomers were so impressed by his artwork that they offered him a job. Tombaugh accepted and got on board.

February 18, 1930 — Tombaugh picked up a faint dot far from the Sun, shifting back and forth. That dot entered the family of planets in the Solar System and was named after the Roman god of the dark underworld: Pluto.

Time for a twist in the story. Pluto wasn't always so small, at least not in our measurements. In 1955, astronomers said Pluto had the same mass as planet Earth. Then, in 1968, the advancement in measurement technology revealed that Pluto is just 20% the mass of the planet Earth, and by 1978, that percentage fell to 0.2%. Now how could something this tiny be a planet, right? So after enjoying the appellation of "planet" for about 76 years, Pluto was demoted by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 and thrown into the category of dwarf planets.

But Pluto had fans. After all, we named Mickey Mouse's dog after it. So there was a massive outrage and news coverage for months. That forced the American Dialect Society to vote plutoed as the word of the year 2006. "Plutoed" means "demote or devalue someone or something."

And NBC News said —

"Pluto is finally getting some respect — not from astronomers, but from wordsmiths."