Oxford Dictionaries' 2015 Word of the Year

Each year Oxford Dictionaries shortlists entries for their Word of the Year. The winning Word of the Year is not actually a word at all – it is a pictograph.

The Word of the Year is the LOL emoji (pictured above). The winner was the ‘Faces with Tears of Joy’ emoji (also known as LOL emoji or Laughing emoji) because the SwiftKey company said it comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in America and in England. The second highest usage (with 9%) is this emoji (pictured below):

President of English-based Oxford Dictionaries, Caspar Grathwohl, said that although the emoji has been in use since 1999, the emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year. ‘Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.’ Grathwohl said that emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic and gender borders.

However Oxford Dictionaries has not added or defined any emoji in their database, and they don’t have plans to do so. But the word emoji has been in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese telecommunications planner, is credited with inventing the emoji in 1999. Apparently emoji comes from the Japanese word for picture (e-) and character (moji-).

Other words that made the Oxford Dictionaries 2015 Word of the Year shortlist are:

Ad blocker (noun) – a piece of softward designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page

On fleek (adjective) – extremely good, attractive, or stylish

Refugee (noun) – ap person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster

They (singular pronoun) – used to refer to a person of unspecified sex.

http://time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/?xid=homepage

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