Oxford Dictionaries Declares GIF And Omnishambles The Words Of The Year

Dictionaries aren't exactly obsolete. Sure, there are many who would rather check the internet than page through a giant book of words, but those dictionaries that provide us with definitions, correct spelling and punctuation for thousands of words have branched out online. That includes Oxford Dictionaries, which has declared their Word of the Year for both the U.S. and the U.K.

.GIF is the file extension for a certain type of image and is often used for animated images online. The verb version of that would be to GIF. As in, I'm glad someone thought to GIF a montage of Joffrey slaps from Game of Thrones because I find it disturbingly entertaining:

GIFs have been around for decades, but given the growing popularity of tumblr and other social networking sites, added to the numerous apps/programs that allow people to make them, not to mention the accessibility of video online these days, the image format is as popular as ever. People can GIF their favorite movie scenes or TV shows with relative ease.

According to Time, runners-up for Word of the Year this year are "superstorm," "Super PAC" and "Eurogeddon," the latter of which describes the financial struggles being dealt with by the countries using the Euro.

The British Word of this year is "omnishambles," which sounds like a synonym for the ultimate fail (or as Time puts it, "a pithy counterpart to Murphy's Law"), as it's described as, "characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations." I like it. That's a word with a lot of potential for use.