GIF is Oxford’s 2012 Word of the Year in the US

It was two decades ago that Tim Berners-Lee and his CERN colleagues uploaded the very first .GIF file to the Internet, and GIF has come a long way since then. Being the abbreviation of “graphics interchange format”, it has at long last taken its place among the pantheon of tech words in the Oxford dictionary, having good company such as “tweet,” “blog,” and “google”. Bear in mind that GIF remains Oxford’s Word of the Year 2012 in the US, while our friends living across the pond has named “omnishambles” as its Word of the Year in the UK.

Back in the US, “GIF” managed to beat out “superstorm”, a term that gained popularity after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, while “YOLO,” a shortened version of “You only live once”, proved to put up quite a fight as well. Glad that the road to such prominence, while long and winding, proved worthwhile – will JPG make the cut anytime soon?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers