If you’re a lover of emojis, the ‘tears of joy’ emoji will pressumably feature in your ‘frequently used,’ if you’ve never sent a string of the laughing until you cry emoji faces, your friends just aren’t funny enough. However, as much as I love and use the emoji, I was amongst those shocked when this week Oxford Dictionaries announced it as the word (emoji?!) of the year 2015. For the first time ever, an emoji (or pictograph as Oxford Dictionaries called it) beat actual words, in a dictionary, as word of the year. The word is chosen based on an annual survey of Britain’s changing language, and due to its popularity on social media, the tears of emoji has won out.
I agree, 2015 has been the year of the emoji, and I was rather excited when new emojis were released over the last few weeks as I’ve always wanted a unicorn emoji, however, with other contenders such as, ‘Sharing Economy,’ ‘Refugee’ and ‘Dark Web’ perhaps there was a better, more relevant choice? Reading through the contenders though, I can only be happy the emoji won out over the phrase ‘On Fleek’ which perhaps would be even more of a travesty.
(From OxfordDictionaries.com)
Emojis have been around since the late 1990s, however this year, their rise has been so vast, even Presidential Candidates now want you to summarise your thoughts on topics in emojis. Emojis are a small image or icon that expresses ideas and emotions via electronic communication. The fact all generations are now using them, and are promting topics based upon them gives credit to thier popularity and shows their relevance in 2015, especially if those users are potential future Presidents!
I wrote last week about brands using hashflag emojis to their advertising advantages, and there have been recent rumours emojis are being tested by Twitter to create emoji- based reactions to tweets- instead of just ‘liking’ a tweet, soon you might be able to respond via emoji, you can see more about this on the Inquisitr site.
Perhaps we only have ourselves to blame, with the emoji making up 20% of all emojis used in the UK in 2015 and 17% in the US, our social media use has caught up to us and caused the emoji to be word of the year as Oxford Dictionary captured the cultural zeitgeist of the year.
I enjoyed the summary the Guardian gave in the form of a gif…