The wordsmiths at K&K were disappointed to learn this week that Oxford Dictionaries’ much anticipated “word of the year” for 2015 was not “fleek” or “badonkadonk” as we had hoped and written in our dream journal. This year marked the first time neither a word nor phrase topped the list.
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Oxford University Press and London-based Swiftkey, which develops keyboard apps for smartphones, jointly researched how people were using emoji.
“Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate”, according to the judges reported by BT.com. No, not the word “emoji”, but a single, specific emoji.
“There were other strong contenders from a range of fields, outlined below, but [] was chosen as the “word” that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015″, according to the Oxford Dictionary blog.
The choice was revealed on the organization’s website, which announced “for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a pictograph”, followed by the emoji itself, and the further explanation that it’s “officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoiji”, although we’re not sure what emoji high lord conveyed official status on the moniker.
In May, the term “emoji” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In a world that is becoming increasingly borderless, especially when it comes to the web, emojis are a universal, easy-to-understand language.
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They found that “face with tears of joy” emoji was the most used emoji worldwide, making up 20 percent of all the emojis used in the United Kingdom in 2015, and 17 percent of those in the United States. National Post reporter and frequent word user Rebecca Tucker sees emojis as a way to express emotion over a digital platform that previously was unable to. And since we know how popular emojis became in 2015, that really is saying something. 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.
