For the first time ever, Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is an emoji – ?. The emoji which stands for ‘face with tears of joy’ is a hit across social media and messaging platforms, used to convey (mostly) laughter.
According to Oxford University Press, they partnered with Swiftkey, a keyboard app, to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and ? was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015.
In the shortlist for the 2015 Word of the Year were, ‘sharing economy’, ‘they’, ‘on fleek’, ‘ad blocker’, ‘refugee’, ‘brexil’, ‘Dark Web’, and ‘lumbersexual’.
According to Oxford, the Word of the Year is usually picked from notable words that have gained linguistic currency during a particular year.
In 2014, the word of the year was ‘vape’, an abbreviation of vapour or vaporize which in context means ‘to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device’. 2013 saw ‘selfie’ as the word of the year after the word gained mainstream popularity, thanks to Instagram.
