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Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…

AKA the 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji.

Where will they file this in their dictionary?

Have the people at Oxford made a large mistake, or is there a standard method for dealing with non alphanumeric symbols such as

@#$%^(*&";

etc.?

Dan Bron
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Wayfaring Stranger
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  • In a statement about the choice, *Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries, wrote:* You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st-century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps -- it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oxford-word-of-the-year-emoji_564a222fe4b06037734a2e71 –  Nov 18 '15 at 20:02
  • This probably needs some thought. In cases where numbers and letters are mixed, numbers are usually listed before letters. So 3-D ... a ... A5 ... aa (ignoring whether or not hyphens register). One assumes that pictographs might precede numbers. Really a question about resources, though. / The emoticon is a burgeoning pragmatic marker, subset 'to convey author's feelings or attempt to direct reader's feelings', like (though these are probably more than detachable markers) 'Let's be glad that [...]', 'You should be ashamed of yourself – ...'. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 18 '15 at 20:39
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    It will be sorted alongside Prince's former glyph name. – Steven Littman Nov 18 '15 at 21:03
  • They define a set of collation rules. To the computer programmer it's a simple task to deal with, so long as someone provides the rules and they are deterministic. – Hot Licks Nov 18 '15 at 21:07
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's asking about the sort order of emojis, and further, asks for speculation about how the OED might choose to order them in their dictionary. – Jim Nov 18 '15 at 22:48
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    It seems a clear and reasonable question to me. I'm very interested to know how OED will cope with the flood of pictographs they have endorsed. Just because there is no obvious answer doesn't mean the question shouldn't be asked. – Dan Nov 19 '15 at 00:05
  • @Jim : Emojis are represented as numbers between 8 and 32 bits long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode and vary by font choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji . Oxford's opened a gigantic can of worms here, and I'd like to know how they plan to deal with it. – Wayfaring Stranger Nov 19 '15 at 01:18
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    @WayfaringStranger- that's great. I know how they're represented. I just don't think this is about English Language and Usage- OED’’s decision notwithstanding. And even if it was, you’d only get opinions on what the OED might do unless 1. There’s someone here that represents the OED or 2. The OED has some sort of published paradigm that we could quote- but then that would be GR. – Jim Nov 19 '15 at 01:36
  • OED != ODO They are two separate products and entities (but somewhat associated under Oxford University). – Mitch Nov 23 '15 at 18:17
  • @EdwinAshworth wait, I thought emojis were punctuation used to look like a picture. o now emojis have already gone semantic drift and are essentially the pictograms in Unicode? – Mitch Nov 23 '15 at 18:23
  • I don't think I'm alone, but on my Chrome browser, I do not see any image, just three square boxes. Now, my Chrome browser is f@cked in other ways, admittedly, but for at least a year I've been pointing out this inconvenience. So... could the user also include a jpg image, please? I can see the images on my iPhone 3, so that's something I suppose. – Mari-Lou A Nov 24 '15 at 07:48

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