Oxford Dictionary’s Word Of The Year Is An Emoji; Details Released!

Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, said conventional words have been having a tough time fulfilling the surging needs of visual communication in recent years.

The Oxford Dictionaries has chosen its Word of the Year for 2015, and it is not a word but an emoji portraying a “face with tears of joy”. Of course, “emoji” has been floating around the English-speaking world for a couple of years now, but it’s not like the “Face with Tears of Joy” symbol just came into being in the last 12 months, either.

These “emojis” are used since the late 1990’s but had the biggest impact in 2015.

Every year, Oxford’s selection team, comprised of lexicographers and consultants to the dictionary team, and editorial, marketing, and publicity staff, talks about several options and selects a word, expression or in this case, emoji.

I can’t help feeling that “emoji” would have been a much more appropriate choice for Word of the Year, and much more representative of emerging vocabulary, than what amounts to an emoji popularity contest. This year, Oxford University Press have partnered with a leading mobile technology business, Swiftkey to explore the most commonly used emojis in 2015.

“It’s not surprising that a pictographic script-like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps – it’s flexible, immediate and infuses tone beautifully”, he added.

The face with tears of joy emoji was chosen as the word of the year because 20% of people in United Kingdom and 17% in United States in 2015 use it. The emoji usage increased from 4% and 9% in 2014. “As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders”, the statement continued. In 2012, the U.S. Word of the Year was “GIF”, the following year was “selfie.”, and the word of the year for 2014 was vape. Other words that nearly made the cut for 2015 were “Ad blocker”, “Dark Web”, “lumbersexual”, “on fleek”, “refugee”, “Brexit”, and “sharing economy”.