Oxford Dictionaries has announced their choice for the 2014 word of the year, and the winner is "vape", as in the use of an e-cigarette to inhale bursts of nicotine vapor.
Added to its dictionary in August, Oxford has defined vape as a verb meaning "to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device."
The dictionary's editors also decided the word can be a noun denoting the e-cigarette device itself.
"You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year," they said on the OxfordWords blog announcing their choice.
Along with the increased popularity of the vaping form of nicotine consumption has come considerable controversy and debate about possible health risks. Some cities have passed ordinances banning vaping indoors.
E-cigarettes, invented in 2003, first began to show up in the United States in 2006.
Despite such early beginnings, it wasn't until 2009 that vape (and vaping) started to appear with regularity in mainstream sources, the editors said.
Vape as the word of the year won out over other contenders, including Bae, a term of endearment or a romantic partner; Budtender, a person who dispenses medical marijuana in a dispensary; and Normcore, denoting unfashionable clothing chosen and worn deliberately as a fashion statement.
As it usual with new words, a number of different uses and combinations have popped up, such as vape shop and vape pen, vape fluid and vape lounge.
Vape joins previous words selected as "word of the year" by the editors and lexicographers at Oxford Dictionaries, including gif, unfriend and selfie.
Their choices are often supported by specialized software that can scan the Internet for newly emerging words, shifts in word use frequency, or changes in usage of an existing word.
Although chosen as 2014's word of the year -- the criteria are that it has rapidly gained prominence and in some manner captures the essence of a year -- vape will not necessarily be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
That requires that a word meet much stricter criteria including a longer-term demonstration that it will become a lasting part of the English language -- a measure that many words fail, showing themselves to be passing linguistic fads.
Words that do persist are often those describing or capturing the emergence of a new trend or technology, the Oxford editors say.
