This time last year, Oxford Dictionaries announced that their word of the year was vape. The announcement seemed rather tame compared with the American Dialect Society’s decision to make the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter its word of the year or the Global Language Monitor’s choice of a heart emoji.
However, this year Oxford Dictionaries have chosen an emoji of their own as their latest word of the year. The Tears of joy emoji was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. Indeed Tears of Joy accounted for 20% of all emojis used in the UK in 2015 and 17% in the US. The word emoji itself has seen its use triple over the last year.
Sources and more reading: Oxford University Press; TheNextWeb;