New Delhi: After taking over our digital conversations, emojis are slowly entering the official house of words with the ‘Face with tears of joy’ becoming the first emoji to be named as 'Word of the Year' by Oxford Dictionaries.
Announcing it on its official blog, Oxford Dictionaries explains the pictograph was given the crown this year because it best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.
Although emojis have been around since the late 1990s, this year their use grew immensely including the use of the word ‘emoji’.
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 the ‘Face with tears of joy’ emoji was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015.
The emoji made up 20 per cent of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17 per cent of those in the US.
Words which made to the shortlist of WOTY include ‘ad blocker,’ ‘brexit’, ‘dark web’, ‘on fleek’, ‘lumbersexual’, ‘refugee’, ‘sharing economy’, and ‘they’.
An emoji might have been chosen as the 'Word of the Year' and they often come to our aid when we don't know how to react in words, but emojis could also get you in translation trouble.
Do we know the official names of the emojis? Take this quiz:
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