Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji
Updated: Nov. 16, 2015 2:08 PM
By Katy Steinmetz
It's a historic
moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since
1999
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.”
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.
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 : Oxford Dictionaries
What : Announce "Word of the
Year"
When : Nov.16,2015
Where: Not given
Why: Not given
How: Not given
Keywords:
announce (v.) 宣布
pictograph (n.) 圖形文字
digital (a.) 數位的
staple (n.) 產物
embody (v.) 體現
core aspect (n.) 核心概念
transcends (v.) 超越
linguisitic border (n.) 語言界限
iconic (a.) 標誌性的
sociolinguist (n.) 社會語言學家
I think it's a interesting and easy way let people to show their emotion by using this pictograph.It easily helps me showing my emotion without writing words.It is very interesting!!! No wonder it can be Oxford's 2015 word of the year!!!!
回覆刪除And I think that's also why the sticker in LINE can be so loved by people :))
刪除To my surprise,emoji can be“World of the Years”in 2015. I knew many people using emoji in their message frequently but I didn't know emoji were grow to such popular to be added in “World of the Year ”.
回覆刪除Maybe one day emoji will replace words, and people will communicate each other just with emoji and few words.
That's how stickers in LINE work :))
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