In a surprising announcement made yesterday, Oxford Dictionaries declared its 2015 Word of the Year isn't a word at all. It's the "Face With Tears of Joy," a move the lexicon guide says symbolizes just how important these little digital faces, creatures, foods, and scenes have become to our daily lives.
"Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year," the company's team wrote in a press release. "Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate."
Oxford University Press, mother company to the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionaries Online, partnered with mobile technology company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was the most popular over the past year. Analysts found the "Face With Tears of Joy" emoji got the most play: The happy crier was used in 20 percent of all emoji-bearing texts in the United Kingdom and in 17 percent of emoji-bearing texts in the United States.
Before it made its final decision, Oxford Dictionaries also considered the following words for its yearly honor: sharing economy, they, on fleek, ad blocker, refugee, Brexil, dark web, and lumbersexual.
What do you think of Oxford Dictionaries' decision to use an emoji as it's "word" of the year? Would you have chosen one of its other selections for this honor?
