Oxford Dictionary's Word Of The Year Is An Emoji; Details Released!
The Oxford Dictonaries word of the year is not an actual word but a pictograph.
The 2015 word of the year is a face with tears of joy emoji, which stands out among other word contenders, according to OxfordWords blog.
These "emojis" are used since the late 1990's but had the biggest impact in 2015. Oxford University collaborated with SwiftKey, a mobile keyboard technology to conduct a statistic survey of the frequently used emoji worldwide.
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.
"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.
Oxford Dictionaries President, Casper Grathwohl said that, "You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication," according to The Verge.
"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. As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders," the statement continued.
The face with tears of joy emoji is one among the words in the list like, Ad blocker, Brexit, on fleek, Dark Web, refugee, lumbersexual, sharing economy and they.
"The pronoun 'they' is one of the most common words in English, but it has been thrust into the spotlight recently with reference to people with non-binary gender identities," according to The Wall Street Journal.
The new Oxford Dictionaries word or emoji of the year followed the word "vape" which was hailed as the top word in 2014. Although, Oxford Dictionaries has no plans to include the words onto its pages.
