Which emoji won Oxford Dictionaries’ 2015 Word of the Year title?

Oxford Dictionaries named Face with Tears of Joy its 2015 Word of the Year.

The choice reflected the emoji’s enormous popularity in digital communication. Oxford reported that the symbol was the most-used emoji in the United Kingdom and the United States that year, and said its selection represented the rapid growth of visual communication.

The award was unusual because the winner was a pictograph rather than a conventional word. Oxford Dictionaries used the title to recognize how emoji can add emotional tone, irony, or emphasis to short messages.

Face with Tears of Joy is sometimes confused with Loudly Crying Face. The former usually shows laughter so intense that tears appear, while the latter conventionally depicts uncontrollable sadness. Designs vary between platforms, but the Unicode character is the same.