Oxford American Dictionary Names 'GIF' Word Of The Year

Don't worry — if you don't know what the word "GIF" means, now you can look it up in the Oxford American Dictionary, which just named the 25-year-old acronym, which stands for "graphic interchange format," its word of the year.

GIF, pronounced "jif," like the peanut butter, was coined in 1987 to stand for those grainy, short video files that run over and over again on a loop and generally show something funny. The term has gained immense popularity in the Internet age, and has the appeal of being able to function as a noun or a verb.

"Like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier," said Katherine Martin, head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press USA, reports the New York Daily News. The word has multiple applications in serious research and journalism.

Other runners-up for the honor included another acronym, "YOLO," standing for "you only live once," "superstorm," which has been used with increasing frequency considering recent weather conditions, and even "nomophobia," defined as the fear of being without your cell phone, created by the words "no mobile phone phobia."

The Oxford English Dictionary chose "omnishambles" as their word of the year, defined as "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations," reports Yahoo.com.

However, just because the experts at Oxford choose a term for their word of the year doesn't mean that it is guaranteed placement within future editions of the Oxford Dictionaries.

Watch the following video about the new word of the year, from NewsFixNow.com here:

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