Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year Is the 'Tears of Joy' Emoji

In its annual butchering of the English tongue, Oxford Dictionaries has announced its word of the year for 2015. "Word" is perhaps a generous accolade, as it's actually not a word at all but a pictograph: the twisted, maniacal laughing-crying emoji known as "Face With Tears of Joy."

FWTOJ appears differently depending on which platform you're using, but it shares the same characteristics: crazed toothy grin, multiple tears of apparent delight, eyes closed to the harsh truth of reality. It's disconcerting, then, that Oxford Dictionaries says the emoji "was chosen as the 'word' that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015."

We only have ourselves to blame. Oxford University Press—which runs the Oxford Dictionaries site—partly based their decision on data from mobile tech company SwiftKey, which found the smiley to be the most-used emoji of the year. They report that Face With Tears of Joy made up a full 20 percent of all emojis used in the UK, and 17 percent in the US—a significant increase from four percent and nine percent the previous year.

This Word of the Year follows previous tech-related winners such as "vape" in 2014 and "selfie" in 2013. It's actually not the first time an emoji has been touted as worthy of word-level status; in 2014, the Global Language Monitor gave its yearly top spot to the heart emoji.

So if 2014 was about emoji love, 2015 was about… laughter? Twitter jokes? An inability or unwillingness to express the subtlety of true human emotion? How often do you actually see someone laugh until they cry?

Unless Face With Tears of Joy, like so many words, has evolved in meaning since it was first defined. Maybe those aren't tears of joy. Maybe it's not laughing until you cry. Maybe it's crying until you laugh.

Or maybe Oxford Dictionaries is just LOL-ing at our expense.