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. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. “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. (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: 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.
– 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.)