Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives: 
 
 “Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.” 
 
 Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number: 
 
 Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture. 
 
 Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013. 
 
 Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.” 
 
 Here are the other words that made Oxford’s short list: 
 
 ad blocker, noun: A piece of software designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page. 
 
 Brexit, noun: A term for the potential or hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. 
 
 Dark Web, noun: The part of the World Wide Web that is only accessible by means of special software, allowing users and website operators to remain anonymous or untraceable 
 
 
 
 lumbersexual, noun: a young urban man who cultivates an appearance and style of dress (typified by a beard and checked shirt) suggestive of a rugged outdoor lifestyle 
 
 on fleek, adjective: extremely good, attractive, or stylish 
 
 refugee, noun: A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster 
 
 sharing economy, noun: An economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals, either free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet. 
 
 they (singular), pronoun: Used to refer to a person of unspecified sex. 
 
 Write to Katy Steinmetz at katy.steinmetz@time.com. ||||| Last year it was vape. The year before that, it was selfie. Every year since 2004, Oxford Dictionaries has selected an official word of the year which, according to its Monday press release is “a word or expression chosen to reflect the passing year in language.” 
 
 This year, candidates included lumbersexual, on fleek and refugee, but the winner turned out not to be a word at all, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji whose verbal description is “face with tears of joy.” 
 
 “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, is quoted as saying in the release. 
 
 “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. As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he added. “They can serve as insightful windows through which to view our cultural preoccupations, so it seemed appropriate to reflect this emoji obsession by selecting one as this year’s ‘word’ of the year.” 
 
 To determine which emoji would be named “word” of the year, Oxford partnered with SwiftKey, the mobile technology company behind the SwiftKey Keyboard app. According to SwiftKey research on emoji usage, the “face with tears of joy” emoji was the most commonly used around the world this year, including in the U.S. and U.K., where Oxford declares an annual word of the year. (The U.S. and U.K. words of the year are sometimes the same—like in 2013 and 2014—and other times are separate. In 2012, for example, the U.K. word of the year was omnishambles, while the U.S. winner was “GIF (verb).” 
 
 Every year, Oxford’s selection team—composed of lexicographers and consultants to the dictionary team, and editorial, marketing, and publicity staff—discusses several options and selects a word, expression or in this case, emoji, “that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year.” The 2015 shortlist included (definitions according to Oxford Dictionaries press release): 
 
 ad blocker, noun: A piece of software designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page. 
 
 Brexit, noun: A term for the potential or hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. 
 
 Dark Web, noun: The part of the World Wide Web that is only accessible by means of special software, allowing users and website operators to remain anonymous or untraceable. 
 
 lumbersexual, noun: a young urban man who cultivates an appearance and style of dress (typified by a beard and checked shirt) suggestive of a rugged outdoor lifestyle. 
 
 on fleek, adjective (usually in phrase on fleek): extremely good, attractive or stylish. 
 
 refugee, noun: A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. 
 
 sharing economy, noun: An economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals, either free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet. 
 
 they (singular), pronoun: Used to refer to a person of unspecified sex. 
 
 But “face with tears of joy” won out over the rest of the shortlisted candidates as the 2015 “word” of the year for both the U.S. and the U.K. 
 
 “The Face With Tears of Joy emoji has been in the top 10 emojis viewed on Emojipedia for the entirety of 2015,” Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge tells Newsweek via email. “Even with new emojis like the Hugging Face entering the top 10, the laughing-crying emoji seems to be a crowd favorite.”
– At least it's not an ancient Egyptian pictogram. While this year's Oxford Dictionaries word of the year is not an actual word, it is a popular image: the "face with tears of joy" emoji, Newsweek reports. "You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication," says Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries. "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." Oxford chose this particular emoji by working with SwiftKey, maker of the popular keyboard app, and learning that "face with tears of joy" is the world's most popular emoji. Among the shortlisted 2015 words: ad blocker (noun): the software the stops ads from popping up on websites. Dark Web (noun): that corner of the Internet where website operators and users can go untraced and unidentified. lumbersexual (noun): a youthful urban male who creates a rugged, outdoorsey appearance, usually with checkered shirt and beard. they (singular pronoun): used when mentioning a person who may be male or female. While the "face with tears of joy" emoji took first place, neither it nor any other emoji will be going into Oxford's databases anytime soon, Time reports. (Check out Oxford's word of the year from last year and the year before.)