In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries honoured all the selfie snappers in the world by electing ‘selfie’ as the Word of the Year. In 2014, things became a bit more cloudy with ‘vape’ given the title.
This year, Oxford Dictionaries has topped itself by announcing the “Word of the Year” is not actually a word, but an emoji. The company noted on its site that the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji was chosen because it “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.”
Oxford partnered with popular messaging app SwiftKey as the two companies worked together to understand which emojis were used the most. In the end, the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was the most used emoji globally in 2015.
Oxford also said there were other close contenders for Word of the Year, such as ‘ad blocker’, ‘Brexit’, ‘Dark Web’, ‘on fleek’, ‘lumbersexual’, ‘refugee’, ‘sharing economy’, and ‘they’.
[source] Oxford [/source]
