Every year the Global Language Monitor (GLM) scans the internet to see which are the top words used.
But this year, the top word isn’t a word at all – it’s an emoticon of a heart, the symbol of love.
GLM believes that English is going through a huge sea change because of the number of emoticons now used – its says the Unicode Consortium now recognises a thousand emoticons as part of the language.
The next nine most popular words are hashtag – that’s # and used by the twitterati and Defacebook aficionados; to vape – that’s smoking an electronic cigarette; blood moon – four total eclipses of the moon in 18 months; nano; photo bomb – when people burst into others’ photographs; caliphate; privilege – the supposed advantages of having light coloured skin; bae – that’s your bosom buddy; bash tag – using a hashtag as an offensive word weapon; transparency; sustainable; and lastly, clickbait.
Big Data, says GLM, is number on the tech buzzword list.
The top word in 2000 was Chad and the top phrase dot com.
