Culture

Oxford Dictionaries Just Announced Their Word Of The Year, And Nobody Is Happy About It

It's an emoji. And it's not even a good one.

by Steph Harmon  17 November 2015

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It is a dark, sad day for linguists and boomers everywhere: in the early hours of this morning, the Oxford Dictionaries announced their Word of the Year for 2015.

It is this: ?

I repeat: ?

It’s the first time in the history of Word of the Year that a pictograph has been chosen. And Twitter is not happy.

The Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year is chosen by a selection team of lexicographers and consultants to the dictionary team, as well as their editorial, marketing and publicity staff. The process follows feedback from sophisticated software, which scans the web for new words and usage, and locates daily and monthly trends to examine shifts in the way we use language.

The word of the year doesn’t need to have been coined that year but “it does need to have become prominent or notable during that time”, and the runners up this year included a bunch of newer terms like ‘ad blocker’, ‘sharing economy’, ‘on fleek’, ‘Dark Web’ and ‘they (singular)’ (used to refer to a person of unspecified sex).

This year, Oxford University Press also partnered with Swiftkey to find some of the most popular emoji; according to them, ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ was the most used emoji in 2015. But that wasn’t the only reason it won: “? was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015,” writes Oxford Dictionaries in the news post.

It’s a nice sentiment, sure, but considering “refugee” was also on the shortlist, this one might have been more accurate:

poop-with-eye

Of course, we should have seen this coming. The use of the word ’emoji’ itself has also surged in the past year, since its first found usage in 1997, and Oxford Dictionaries have spent the past little while choosing words that are down with the yoof.

In 2012, the word of the year was ‘GIF‘. In 2013 it was, unanimously, ‘selfie‘.

And in 2014, beating out ‘bae’, ‘budtender’, ‘normcore’ and ‘slacktivism’, the word of the year was ‘vape‘. Perfect.

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