What do you think of this fact?
Every year, Oxford Dictionaries picks a “Word of the Year” meant to capture what people were talking about. In 2013 it was “selfie,” in 2014 “vape.” And in 2015? Not a word at all. It was a yellow face crying with laughter.
The emoji of the year
We’re talking about the emoji officially named “Face with Tears of Joy.” To make its pick, Oxford teamed up with SwiftKey, the company behind a popular phone keyboard app. The data showed that in the UK, this single emoji made up 20 percent of all emojis used, and in the US, 17 percent.
According to Oxford, it best reflected “the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.” It was the first time the honor went to a pictograph instead of a word.
Does that even count as a word?
Not everyone was thrilled. Critics asked whether an emoji could count as a word at all. Oxford itself put “word” in quotation marks and made clear it had no plans to add emojis to the dictionary.
The shortlist was a colorful mix of serious and silly: “Brexit,” “refugee,” “sharing economy,” “Dark Web,” “ad blocker,” “lumbersexual,” “on fleek” and singular “they.” In the end, a laughing face beat them all.
The emoji is older than its big moment: it has been part of the Unicode standard since 2010 and originally came from Japanese mobile carriers.
From hit to has-been
Here’s the irony: in the early 2020s, plenty of Gen Z users started seeing the Word of the Year emoji as dated. Instead of tears of joy, they’d rather send the loudly crying face or a skull to show they were dying of laughter. Many millennials, meanwhile, kept right on using it.
A Word of the Year you can’t even pronounce. Honestly, that’s the most 2015 thing ever.