Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji
Oxford Dictionaries made
history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one
of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type
words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015
is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have
become in our (digital) daily lives:
“Although emoji have been a staple
of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the
global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s
team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a
core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually
driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”
Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford
English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries
Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji
was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face
With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised
nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based.
The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:
Caspar Grathwohl, the
president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the
walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form
of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,”
he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added,
embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that
characterizes emoji-using culture.
Though this marks a historic moment of recognition
for the pictures plastered throughout
tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual
databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do
so at this point. The word emoji,
however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.
Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited
with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons
that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level.
Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes
from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s
easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,”
sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’
long history of using pictures to communicate. “But
there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them
seriously.”
Structure of the lead:
WHO- Not given
WHERE- Not given
WHEN- Nov.
16, 2015
WHAT- “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji,
HOW- A
historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining
popularity since 1999
WHY- People use Emoji to express themselves more
than before
Vocabulary:
1.
Emoji: 表情符號
2.
String:字串
3.
Staple:主要的
4.
Mainstream:主流
5.
Embody:具體表達
6.
Aspect:外觀
7.
Linguistic:語言的
8.
Intimacy:親暱
9.
Emoticon:情緒
10. Iconic:圖像的
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