Just about everybody has taken to using the word "bubble" when talking about the housing market. Among the optimists who have embraced the idea is a condominium developer in Miami who is running an advertisement for two new properties that shows a woman blowing an enormous chewing-gum bubble above the word "Boom!" And at the Mortgage Bankers Association, the chief economist, Doug Duncan, says he subscribes to the Don Ho way of thinking, referring to the singer's hit, "Tiny Bubbles."

But the pessimists are not surrendering the metaphor they started. Robert Shiller, an economist whose book in 2000 predicted the stock market crash, has rereleased the book with a new cover warning of "the worldwide real estate bubble and its aftermath." All of which leads to the question: Does the word "bubble" have any meaning anymore?

In some cases, the word indicates a market in which prices have gone up so far and so fast that they are destined to crash, as some thought might have been happening when a recent report showed that apartment prices in Manhattan had dropped 13 percent from July through September. Others use "bubble" to suggest that prices could drift along for years to come. They might trail inflation for as much as a generation, even if the nature of real estate, with its slow and infrequent transactions, prevents a Nasdaq-like collapse.

To many developers, brokers and bankers, not to mention homeowners, who all have a big stake in the boom, the word has come to symbolize a fabulous market that is likely to slow eventually. The 15 percent annual price jumps of recent years will gently ease into 5 percent or 8 percent increases, they say.

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