ABA Journal The digital English academy
Hello dear friends!
If you don’t know what WOTY stands for, here you are: Word Of The Year. It’s a list of the most common words used in the English language during the past year gathered together by the Oxford Dictionary.
You can find last year’s WOTY here!
WOTY 2015
That’s right – for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year is a pictograph: the also called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, though you may know it by other names.
There were other strong contenders from a range of fields, outlined below, but the emoji was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.
Emojis (the plural can be either emoji or emojis) have been around since the late 1990s, but 2015 saw their use, and use of the word emoji, increase hugely.
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 emoji was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015.
SwiftKey identified that the emoji made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014.
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.
Runners up to the WOTY’s 2015
Ad blocker – A piece of software designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page.
Refugee – A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
They – Used to refer to a person of unspecified sex.
