Oxford Dictionaries’ emoji video made to accompany the announcement.
Read: Help! I Can’t Stop Thinking in Emoji!
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Oxford Dictionaries, the hip younger brother of the historical Oxford English Dictionaries, just announced their 2015 “Word of the Year,” and it’s, well, not really a word. It’s an emoji.
No, not the ever-versatile poop emoji, or the sexualized water droplets, or even the shimmering heart. Apparently, Oxford Dictionaries thinks that the grinning, tearful emoji sometimes known as “Face with Tears of Joy” is deserved of the coveted annual title.
2014’s big word was “vape,” and “selfie” got the title in 2013. Both those words were fairly ubiquitous during their respective years, but does the laughing-until-you-cry emoji really scream “2015”?
Other words in the running were “on fleek,” “refugee,” and the singular pronoun “they.”
Making the Word of the Year “they” could have been a nice acknowledgement of 2015’s slowly shifting cultural tides surrounding gender, and refugee might have been a nice way of showing solidarity with the thousands fleeing war and persecution around the world. But nah, Oxford Dictionaries went with the emoji that looks like
