After 25 years of fighting for relevancy, the GIF has received the acknowledgement it deserves -- as Oxford American Dictionaries' official 2012 word of the year.
Formally known as grapics interchange format, the GIF also physically redefined itself in 2012. What used to be an outdated format has appeared across the web as not only online entertainment, but political debates, sports coverage, fashion and art.
“GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun,” Katherine Martin, head of the US dictionaries program at Oxford told BetaBeat in a statement. “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.”
The following words competed with GIF for the title -- including YOLO, short for "You Only Live Once." (Try to remember 2012 as the year that YOLO almost made it into the dictionary.)
Now, perhaps everyone can agree on the proper way to pronounce it.
1. Eurogeddon: the potential financial collapse of the Eurozone, envisaged as having catastrophic implications for the region’s economic stability [from euro + (arma)geddon]
2. Super PAC: a type of independent political action committee which may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, and individuals but is not permitted to contribute to or coordinate directly with parties or candidates
3. Superstorm: an unusually large and destructive storm
4. Nomophobia: anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone
[from no and mo(bile) + phobia]
5. Higgs boson: a subatomic particle whose existence is predicted by the theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic interactions
6. YOLO: you only live once; typically used as rationale or endorsement for impulsive or irresponsible behavior
7. MOOC: massive open online course; a university course offered free of charge via the internet
Naturally, it's only appropriate to honor the word GIF in the best way possible.
