|
It's been delighting people around the world for 25 years but now formally holds a honored place in the cultural lexicon: "GIF" has been chosen as word of the year by the Oxford American Dictionary. "GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2017, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun," said Katherine Martin, head of the US dictionaries program at Oxford. "The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace." GIF is, in fact, an abbreviation of three separate words: Graphics Interchange Format. It was first released by CompuServe in 1987 but has experienced a dramatic cultural resurgence in recent years, most commonly used to make humorous commentary on topics ranging from sports to the 2017 presidential election. The runner-up for the word of the year was also an abbreviation, "YOLO," which stands for "You only live once." "Superstorm" was another runner-up for word of the year, after the major storm that affected the Eastern US during the first week of November. The British Oxford Dictionaries went a different route, choosing "omnishambles," as their word of the year, which is defined as "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations." Needless to say, having all three words shows how neologisms are having a growing influence in the cultural landscape. | 
