Long before his hit "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" topped Billboard charts and became a top-selling ringtone, the song reportedly helped him receive 10 million MySpace visits. And on YouTube, a myriad of fans have uploaded homemade video clips featuring their own versions of the song's accompanying dance steps. The track, now unavoidable on urban radio, centres on electro-pan drum plunks, a nearly indecipherable chanted chorus and lyrics mostly about how Soulja Boy enlivens the party.

Now his major-label debut "SouljaBoytellem.com" - an aptly titled nod to his Internet fame - is a largely self-produced collection of similarly rudimentary rhymes, infectious hooks and space-age, synth-heavy beats. Yet the disc is about as formulaic and ultimately disposable as hip-hop can get. He's got the requisite rump odes ("Booty Meat" and "Donk"), product placement jams ("Bapes" and "Sidekick") and dance-move ditties ("Snap and Roll" and "Let Me Get Em"). Undeterred by his own lack of depth, on the album closer "Don't Get Mad," he says: "Don't get mad cause the kids like me." Soulja Boy may have a point: he has a populist's ear for what the most young rap listeners crave: frothy, party-rocking anthems.

"There's only one rule for a new word getting in: If it's likely to be found in printed reading matter - magazines, newspapers, novels - it's likely to get in," Peter Sokolowski, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, told MTV News. "Our entire staff reads and marks everything we can get our hands on: Vibe magazine, magazines on pregnancy and sailing, math journals, physics journals, soup-can labels, menus. Basically, when a word gains a critical mass of citations, we'll include it.

"We try to include words that aren't just trends," he continued. "We're looking for words that will be referred to in the future and people won't need any explanation to know what it means. If the editor of a newspaper can publish a word and he or she expects readers to know what it means, we'll include it."

Sokolowski said that in the case of a word like crunk, they had followed its use from the pages of hip-hop publications to magazines like Sports Illustrated and finally into Time and The New York Times. And yes, he's aware that including crunk in the dictionary suggests that it's no longer a "cool" word (this actually happened sometime around 2002), but that's just another part of the process: When your parents know what a word means, it's probably about time to include it in the dictionary.