Black Mirror’s technology is could soon be real, and virtual reality is coming to the internet, so perhaps it’s fitting that the most popular word of the year was not a word at all, but the heart emoji. Obviously there are plenty of “most popular word lists” of 2014, so take this with a grain of salt, but the finding from the Global Language Monitor is noteworthy because this is “the first time an ideograph has captured [the] Word of the Year honors.”
Indeed, emojis are so commonplace that we’ve begun to experiment with emoji-based art and emoji-only communication. It’s suffice to say that the budding visual language is only going to expand and take over. Until then, we’re still clunking away on our QWERTY keyboards.
