Which publisher chose GIF as its 2012 U.S. Word of the Year?

Oxford University Press chose GIF as its 2012 U.S. Word of the Year. More precisely, the American wing of Oxford Dictionaries selected GIF, including its emerging use as a verb meaning “to create a GIF file.”

The choice reflected how animated images had moved beyond simple web decoration. Oxford’s lexicographers noted that GIFs were becoming a serious communication tool in journalism, research, and online conversation, not merely a novelty. The announcement referred specifically to the U.S. word-of-the-year program, which was separate from the United Kingdom’s selection of “omnishambles” that year.

GIF itself stands for Graphics Interchange Format, a bitmap image format introduced by CompuServe in 1987. It supports animation by displaying a sequence of frames, although GIFs are not technically video files. A common mix-up is to treat “GIF” as the U.S. and U.K. word of the year simultaneously; only the American Oxford program selected it in 2012. Pronunciation is another famous disagreement, with both hard- and soft-G versions widely used.