An emoji becomes Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015

The word chosen by Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is the emoji “face with tears of joy”. (Picture source: blog.oxforddictionaries.com/)

For the first time, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the year is a pictograph. Officially called the “face with tears of joy” emoji. It is chosen as the “word” that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.

According to mobile technology business SwiftKey, this emoji is the most popular in 2015. SwiftKey identifies that it made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015 and 17% of those in the US. It witnessed a huge rise of 4% in the UK and 9% in the US from 2014 to 2015.

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.”

An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication.

In 2014, the word of the year was vape while in 2013, was selfie.

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.