All over the internet, people are celebrating World Emoji Day – so what better choice could there be for our Word for Wednesday? World Emoji Day was launched by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge in 2014, though people sometimes posted the calendar emoji on July 17 before then. This is because July 17 is the date shown on most calendar emojis – though Facebook shows May 14, founder Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday instead. Emojipedia is searched over 25 million times a month and the team there work on updating emoji definitions, tracking the changes to emoji definitions, and keeping up with the latest emoji definitions. Click here to find out some interesting stastics. ...
This week Oxford Dictionaries announced a rather unusual word of the year: Officially called ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, this emoji was chosen as the word that ‘best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015’. The word emoji has been used since the early nineties and is a portmanteau of ‘e’ (as in ‘electronic’ like in ‘email’) and ‘moji’ (Japanese for ‘letter’ or ‘character’). Another word for such pictographs is ‘emoticon’ which is a portmanteau of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’. You can read about other portmanteau words here. What’s your favour...
In this weeks insight into our ever-growing lexis we’ll take a look into an ancient yet hugely popular craft, which originated in the Far East. The invention of paper is widely attributed to the Chinese political official Tsai Lun in the first century. Although paper can be traced to as early as 200BC, he is traditionally credited for the standardization of a papermaking process. It is said that Buddhist monks brought paper to Japan, although paper was still very valuable. It is after this that the Japanese were able to perfect the beautiful and delicate practice of paper folding now known as ‘Origami’. The word Origami is a compound of two shorter and rather obvio...
What is a loanword? A loanword is the term given to a word which is directly borrowed from another language and used in the recipient language without being translated first. One of the reasons why English is such a difficult language to learn (and why its spellings are so inconsistent!) is because the language is full of loanwords. Some loanwords are obvious, such as words used to describe food traditionally from other countries (such as ‘tsatsiki’ or ‘chow mein’), whereas others were borrowed so long ago that you might be surprised to discover they are loanwords at all (such as: ‘pyjamas’ or ‘breeze’). Last week we shared a list of Japa...
Those brave enough to venture from their homes over the next few nights can expect to encounter ghouls, zombies, specters and a whole host of other things macabre. This week’s word for Wednesday is Halloween, where did the word originate from and why do we practice such a bizarre tradition. Let’s begin with how the word came about… The celebration of Halloween in the Christian calendar itself marks the eve of All Saints Day, also known as ‘All Hallows’ – recognition and feast dedicated to saints known and unknown. Halloween is a Scottish contraction of ‘All Hallow’s’ and ‘Evening’, evening was often shortened to &...
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