Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji

The 'face with tears of joy' symbol has been named the word of the year. How did a Japanese teen gimmick end up changing the way we communicate? Plus, a crash course in how to use the aubergine, side eye and sinkhole

The Oxford dictionary has announced its word of the year. It's spelled ... Actually, it isn't spelled at all, because it contains no letters, just a pair of symmetrical eyebrows, eyes, big gloopy tears, and a broad monotooth grin. That's right, the word of the year is the "face with tears of joy" emoji.

But that's not a word at all! If the Oxford dictionary is not going to take the meaning of the word "word" literally, then who is? Caspar Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, laughs. Not so much that he's leaking tears of joy, but he definitely sounds amused. He oversaw the discussions that led to the selection. "We just thought, when you look back at the year in language, one of the most striking things was that, in terms of written communication, the most ascendant aspect of it wasn't a word at all, it was emoji culture." He mentions Hillary Clinton, who tweeted students, asking them to tell her how they felt about their loans "in three emojis or less". Then Moby-Dick was translated into emojis (and renamed Emoji Dick.) Alice in Wonderland underwent the same update - a task that required the use of 250,000 emojis. The author TR Richmond, who used emojis in What She Left, a novel built around texts, blogs and Facebook posts, says that emojis "have a place at the heart of our language".