The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2015 isn’t even a word. It’s an emoji, specifically the crying emoji you see here. It’s a whole new language.
This year Oxford University Press have partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and [this one] was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. SwiftKey identified that [this one] made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014. The word emoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.
There’s more about the decision to go with an emoji, plus the revelation of the eight other words that made the shortlist at the Oxford Dictionaries blog.
-via Geeks Are Sexy