You’ll never guess The Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2015, but when you find out, let’s just say you’ll be crying from laughter.
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“Face with Tears of Joy” was the most heavily used emoji globally in 2015 with the character comprised 20 per cent of all emoji used in the United Kingdom in 2015, and 17 per cent of all emoji used in the US. Suddenly, Face With Tears of Joy emoji doesn’t seem quite so egregious.
Other words and phrases on the “word of the year” shortlist for 2015 include: sharing economy, on fleek, refugee, ad blocker, Brexit, they (when used to refer to a person of unspecified gender), Dark Web, and my personal favorite, lumbersexual.
Once a year Oxford Dictionaries selects a word or expression to reflect the language of the times and announced today that they selected the pictograph to reflect the vast popularity of emojis.
President of Oxford Dictionaries Casper Grathwohl said: “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication”. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps”. It is a cartoon yellow face, shedding two giant tears. Last year’s word of the year was “vape” and this year, the OED is having a laugh about it.
By that qualification, I would have picked ¯/_(ツ)_/¯ as the word of the year, but that’s neither here nor there.
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Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases.
