Say hello to your Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year:
That's right - it's literally not a word. The folks at ODW picked a pictograph - what we commonly refer to as an emoji - as the word of 2015. You've probably seen this face in your texts messages and chats, but you probably didn't know its name: Face with Tears of Joy emoji. You probably also know it as the laughing emoji, laughing crying/tears emoji, or, simply, the LOL emoji.
Though around since the late 90s', emojis (and the word "emoji") have seen an astounding increase in popularity this year alone, according to Oxford.
Partnering with SwiftKey, Oxford found that Face with Tears of Joy was the most popular emoji used globally in 2015. Twenty percent of all emojis sent in the UK this year were FWTOJ, up from 4% last year, and the US usage of the pictograph jumped from 9% to 17%.
You can't really argue with the effectiveness of emojis in conveying emotions, nor the universality of images over words. That said, it seems a littttllle bit of a stretch/grasp for relevancy to select an emoji as your word of the year, but maybe that's just us.
The 2015 Word of the Year shortlist included ad blocker, Brexit ("a term for the potential or hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, from British + exit"), Dark Web, on fleek, lumbersexual, refugee, sharing economy and "they," which Oxford defined as "used to refer to a person of unspecified sex."
- Use emojis more than words? This keyboard is for you
from www.techradar.com
