Which word mostly used in 2015? The word emoji

The meaning

'Face with Tears of Joy'

The word emoji

"Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year," the Oxford Dictionaries press release reads.

"Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate."

Oxford Dictionaries seems to think so. For the first time, the Word of the Year is not even a word. It's a pictograph: an emoji officially called 'Face with Tears of Joy'.

"There were other strong contenders from a range of fields, outlined below, but ('Face with Tears of Joy emoji) was chosen as the 'word' that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015," according to the Oxford Dictionary blog.

How did Face with Tears of Joy emerge victorious, defeating such formidable contenders as they, lumbersexual and refugee in the pitched battle to embody the year that was?

It was the world's most used emoji in 2015, according to figures compiled by Oxford University Press and mobile technology firm SwiftKey.

In 2015 it made up 20 per cent of all emojis used in the UK and 17 per cent of those used in the US, the research found.

As for the word emoji – a Japanese loanword derived from e "picture" + moji "letter, character" – it has appeared in English since 1997. But data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus shows use of the word more than trebled in 2015, compared with 2014.