Emoji, meme, photobomb and clickbait are now official words. These four internet slang words are among the 23 new words legitimized by the unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Aside from emoji, meme, photobomb and clickbait, the dictionary also added terms about the natural world and physiology including colossal squid, colony collapse disorder, palliative care and neurofeedback. Other terms are about business and technology, such as net neutrality, click fraud, dark money and sharing economy.
As defined by Merriam-Webster, emoji is "any of various small images, symbols, or icons in text fields in electronic communication to express the emotional attitude of the writer, convey information succinctly, communicate a message playfully without using words, etc."
The term emoji is borrowed from Japanese, in which the word literally means pictograph. It is a combination of e, which means picture, and moji, which means letter or character. Recently, the Unicode Consortium has released 38 proposed new emoji for 2016. In April, Apple released numerous new emoji in iOS 8.3, Refinery29 reported.
Two of the 23 new official words are about linguistics, which are vocal fry and eggcorn, four are about food, which are crema, lambrusco, chilaquiles and macaron, two are about music, which are hsaing-waing and slendro, and one is about clothing, which is jeggings.
The remaining two new official terms are abbreviations; NSFW stands for not safe (or suitable) for work, a warning that a website or an e-mail attachment should not be viewed at most places of employment, while WTF stands for what the f-k.