‘Vape’, ‘culture’, ‘photobomb’, ‘overshare’ and ‘heart emoji’ have been named the top words of 2014 by various dictionaries and language monitoring groups.
Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘vape’, an abbreviation of vapour or vaporise, as word of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc., chose the word ‘culture’, which dominated headlines this year.
‘Photobomb’, defined as “to intrude into the background of a photograph without the subject’s knowledge”, was Collins English Dictionary’s top word.
Chambers Dictionary’s choice was ‘overshare’, which means “to be unacceptably forthcoming with information about one’s personal life” and the Global Language Monitor named ‘heart emoji’, the ideograph for love, as its word of 2014.