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Oxford University Press Announces GIF as 2012 Word of the Year

Tuesday 13. November 2012 - Oxford American Dictionaries announced today that it chose the verb GIF asits 2012 Word of the Year. According to Oxford Dictionaries Online GIF is defined as:

— GIF, verb; to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence,
especially relating to an event).
“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 20(th) 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 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:
1. Eurogeddon: the potential financial collapse of the Eurozone, envisaged
as having catastrophic implications for the region’s economic stability
[from euro + (arma)geddon]
2. 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
3. Superstorm: an unusually large and destructive storm
4. Nomophobia: anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone [from no
and mo(bile) + phobia]
5. Higgs boson: a subatomic particle whose existence is predicted by the
theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic interactions
6. YOLO: you only live once; typically used as rationale or endorsement for
impulsive or irresponsible behavior
7. MOOC: massive open online course; a university course offered free of
charge via the internet