…not really a word at all.

Each year, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, the long-standing if self-appointed guardians of the English language and official record keeper of new words, names a word, phrase, or slang term its “Word of the Year,” reflecting a major impact on society, the news, or communications. Past Words of the Year include:

Truthiness (2006): Coined by Stephen Colbert to mean the idea of facts or truth based on feeling or intuition, as opposed to evidence.

Chad (2000): as in hanging chad, the troublesome paper chips still left on ballots in Florida in the contentious 2000 presidential election recount.

WMD (2002): short for “weapons of mass destruction,” the fear that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had them is what led to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2015, however, isn’t a word, or even a phrase. It’s a pictograph. More specifically, it’s an emoji, those little pictures sent on text that convey a lot of emotion and feelings that were omnipresent in 2015. (Probably why one is the Word of the Year.) Emoji use has doubled in the past year.

Specifically, the emoji picked is the “Face with Tears of Joy,” one of the most commonly used emoji.

Some of the other words on the Oxford editors’ shortlist were “sharing economy” (the economic model used by businesses like AirBnB and Uber), “on fleek” (a slang term meaning “stylish”), and “lumbersexual” (a hip young man who wears plaid skirts and a beard, resembling a lumberjack).