Oxford Dictionaries has chosen the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji as its Word of the Year, meant to reflect the rising popularity of the pictograph across the globe in 2015. The team behind the selection thinks the emoticon best reflects the ethos, moods and preoccupations of the year.
It’s the 1st time a symbol has bagged the honor of being the Word of the Year. The Oxford University Press decided to join hands with keyboard app SwiftKey to investigate which emoji was the most commonly used across the world. The laughing emoticon had a 20% share among all other expressions in the UK, a rapid rise from the 4% utilization it got in 2014.
Similarly, the pictograph saw 17% of people in the US using it, growing from the 9% it boasted of a year ago. Even the word emoji has been seeing steady growth in the last few years. Although it’s been a fixture in the English language since 1997, utilization of the word has tripled in 2015 compared to 2014 as per the data gathered by the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.
Emoji comes from the Japanese language, the term a mashing up of e, meaning picture, and moji, signifying a letter character. The phrase is officially defined as a small digital image or icon used to represent an idea or emotion in electronic communication. Its increase in accessibility has been boosted by the English word emoticon, itself a combination of emotion and icon.
Oxford Dictionaries has been choosing trendy internet-friendly expressions for some time now, having selected the term vape for its Word of the Year in 2014. Other candidates for the title in 2015 include ad blocker, Dark Web, on fleek, lumbersexual, Brexit, refugee, they, and sharing economy.