2012 Word Of The Year Named By Oxford American Dictionaries

"GIF" has been named as the 2012 Word of the Year by the Oxford American Dictionaries.

The Word of the Year is chosen annually as a word that has attracted interest and that embodies in some way the ethos of the year.

Above is an example of a GIF image

"The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier," notes Katherine Martin, Head of the US Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press USA. "GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun. 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."

Indeed, GIFING has had an amazing year in 2012. In January the New York Public Library launched stereogranimator allowing visitors to create GIFs of 40,000+ digitized stereographs from its collection and share them. Then in March Tumblr hit 20 billion blog posts.  July saw the 20th anniversary of the first GIF posted on the World Wide Web, a photograph of the band "Les Horribles Cernettes". In August GIFing was perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics in London, especially this coverage of the vault from The Atlantic. Most recently many media outlets were live-GIFing the 2012 US presidential debates.

GIF beat out a number of other contenders for Word of the Year (WOTY) this year.  A shortlist of other candidates under consideration included:

Eurogeddon: the potential financial collapse of the Eurozone, envisaged as having catastrophic implications for the region’s economic stability [from euro + (arma)geddon]
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
Superstorm: an unusually large and destructive storm
Nomophobia: anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone [from no + mo(bile) + phobia]
Higgs boson: a subatomic particle whose existence is predicted by the theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic interactions
YOLO: you only live once; typically used as rationale or endorsement for impulsive or irresponsible behavior
MOOC: massive open online course; a university course offered free of charge via the internet

Courtesy of Oxford American Dictionaries