Which emoji was named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015?

The Face with Tears of Joy emoji was named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015. The choice marked a moment when pictorial symbols had become a major part of everyday written communication.

Oxford Dictionaries selected 😂 after research with SwiftKey found it was the most-used emoji globally in 2015. It represented about 20% of emoji use in the United Kingdom and 17% in the United States, making it a strong indicator of the year’s online mood and communication habits.

The emoji depicts a face laughing so intensely that tears appear at the corners of its eyes. It was included in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, helping different computer systems encode and exchange it consistently. Apple released it worldwide in 2011, accelerating its international popularity.

A common mix-up is calling it merely the “laughing emoji.” Its official Unicode name is Face with Tears of Joy, while “crying laughing” and “laughing-crying” are informal descriptions. Oxford’s selection was also symbolic: the winner was an emoji rather than a conventional word.