Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014. The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism.
Vape, which refers to an electronic cigarette or similar device (or the act of inhaling/exhaling from such devices), certainly seems to reflect technological advancements much in the way that 2013’s Word of the Year selfie did.
But what evidence has been used to make this decision?
There’s no doubt that Oxford Dictionaries has lots of it to draw upon. They host a massive collection of samples of written English from around the world, otherwise known as a corpus (and I mean massive – nearly 2.5 billion words). These samples are collected largely from the internet, and include a huge variety of types of language including novels, newspaper articles, and social media.
They found that between 2013 and 2014, the word “vape” had doubled in use. This is not to say that it hasn’t been around for a while already - Oxford Dictionaries claim that this is by no means a new word, dating to the early 1980s. The earliest use they’ve found is in a 1983 article in New Society entitled: “Why do People Smoke”. The author, Rob Stepney, described a hypothetical device being explored at the time:
An inhaler or “non-combustible” cigarette, looking much like the real thing, but … delivering a metered dose of nicotine vapour. (The new habit, if it catches on, would be known as vaping.)
