It’s a time-honored tradition. Every year publications have a tradition of marking and honoring the best of the best—People Magazine has the “Sexiest Man Alive,” Glamour has the “Woman of the Year,” GQ has “Men of the Year.” Oxford Dictionary? For obvious reasons, it has the “Word of the Year.”
For the past 11 years, Oxford Dictionaries has named a Word of the Year. The award is given to a word that, according to Oxford, “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.” Past words of the year have included words such as vape (2014), selfie (2013), GIF (2012) and unfriend (2009).
Keeping up with the theme of digital words, Oxford chose a word for 2015 that isn’t even a word at all. Instead, they chose an emoji, known formally as the “Face with Tears of Joy.”
It sounds funny that the word of the year isn’t even a word, but after pairing up with mobile technology business SwiftKey, Oxford University Press discovered that this particular emoji was the most popular in the entire world. It rose in popularity in the U.S. from 9 percent to 17 percent over the past year, while the word “emoji,” which has been around since the late ‘90s, tripled in use just this past year alone.
Along with the word of the year, comes a shortlist of those which were considered to win the top honor. These words include the ever so popular phrases “on fleek” and “lumbersexual,” as well as words such as refugee, ad blocker, they (singular), Brexit, “Dark Web” and “sharing economy.”
The statistics don’t lie, but what do you think, collegiettes? Is the tears of joy emoji the most popular in your phone?