Oxford American Dictionaries has selected its annual "Word of the Year," and that word is GIF. You are already familiar with GIF as in Graphics Interchange Format, or this images that change and move. the Word of the Year is for GIF as a verb!
“The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier,” notes Katherine Martin, Head of the US Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press USA. “GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun. The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.”
Indeed, GIFING has had an amazing year in 2012. In January the New York Public Library launched stereogranimator allowing visitors to create GIFs of 40,000+ digitized stereographs from its collection and share them. Then in March Tumblr hit 20 billion blog posts. July saw the 20th anniversary of the first GIF posted on the World Wide Web, a photograph of the band “Les Horribles Cernettes”. In August GIFing was perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics in London, especially this coverage of the vault from The Atlantic. Most recently many media outlets were live-GIFing the 2012 presidential debates.
And how is it pronounced? The computer programmers who created the format used a soft g like the peanut butter brand Jif, but a hard g is considered correct as well because so many people say it that way. Find out more about the usage of GIF and see the other words that were considered for Word of the Year at the Oford Dictionaries blog. Link
P.S. The Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year is ‘omnishambles.’ Link
Feel OLD. Not OLD.
Oxford Dictionary. Meh MEH.