EwtNet

Tag: emoji

  • Oxford’s word of the year for 2015: ?

    Oxford’s word of the year for 2015: ?

    No joke. It was announced on the Oxford Dictionaries’ blog yesterday that 2015’s word of the year is officially a pictograph, or more commonly known as a emoticon. Which emoticon? ?. Yes, the emoticon dubbed “Face with tears of joy” has been announced as the word of the year. According to the official blog post, the emoji was chosen because it was “the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.”

    Upon such news, one naturally asks “why would this be chosen?” Well, Oxford covered that question in the blog post as well!

    This year Oxford University Press have partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and ? was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. SwiftKey identified that ? made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014. The word emoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.

    emoji-frequencySo, with that it is official. Looks like the use of emojis has developed into something greater than just icons to help add contextual message to our texts; seemingly, they’ve become words their self. For those wondering, there was a graphic created with the “runner-up” words that were looked into for the position that ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ took.

    shortlist-WOTY-2015

    What are your thoughts on Oxford’s choice for word of the year? Leave a comment below!

    source: OxfordWords Blog

  • New Apple Betas Bring More Diversity To Emoji

    New Apple Betas Bring More Diversity To Emoji

    Apple is adding more diverse emoji options to both iOS and OS X, new developer preview builds reveal. These includes various skin color options for emojis featuring people, faces, hands and other exposed skin, as well as new country flags that add to the rather limited original set.

    The new skin tone options are available as alternates when a user clicks (or taps) and holds on any of the face, hand or people emoji, offering a further six skin color selections for any given enjoy in the People section where it’s applicable (meaning not the space invader, ghost, poo, skull or mask emojis, for instance).

    The additional flag set adds 32 to the total collection, including a range of new countries that go beyond a few European, Asian and North American choices. These are offered on their own in the Travel & Places section of the emoji keyboard on iOS, or special character palette in OS X.

    Apple had introduced the extended emoji support in code for previous releases, as reported by 9to5Mac back when the last preview build was made available, but the latest builds make them available to any users with access to the pre-launch software.

    More diversity for Apple emoji has been anticipated since March of last year, when MTV Act emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook and received an email from Apple’s head of PR Katie Cotton, who said that the company would be working with the Unicode Consortium to make more diversity a part of the standard Apple uses from that organization for its visual messaging icons. Unicode published a draft technical report regarding using modifiers to introduce more diversity in emoji last year, co-edited by Google’s Mark Davis and Apple’s Peter Edberg, and this looks like the result of the efforts proposed therein.

    .@kylesethgray @stroughtonsmith pic.twitter.com/UthzD4t8tM
    — Zachary Waldowski (@zwaldowski) February 23, 2015

    In addition to the diversity changes, Apple has also switched up some of the gadgetry imaging, including offering an iPhone 6 for the smartphone image, and an Apple Watch instead of a more traditional timepiece.