The last word on words has spoken. Oxford Dictionaries has chosen “vape” as the word of the year.
It was selected over cringeworthier choices like “slacktivism” or “bae,” the latter a top contender for censorship according to Time magazine’s “which word should be banned in 2015?” poll.
“Vape” is a nod to the popularity of e-cigarettes, a device that contains nicotine but not tobacco, and produces vapor instead of smoke. For the uninitiated, “vape” can refer to inhaling the e-cigarettes vapor and to the e-cigarette device itself. It can be a noun or a verb.
A few examples:
“Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Leonardo DiCaprio vaped on camera at the Golden Globes this year.”
“Some people think vaping is healthier than smoking regular cigarettes.”
“In New Jersey it is illegal to vape indoors.”
“Vape” has taken a while to percolate into popular lexicon. It first appeared in the 1980s when e-cigarettes were a mere twinkle in a man named Rob Stepney’s eye. He wrote an article called “Why do People Smoke” for New Scientist magazine in 1983 that described a hypothetical device:
“an inhaler or ‘non-combustible’ cigarette, looking much like the real thing, but…delivering a metered dose of nicotine vapour. (The new habit, if it catches on, would be known as vaping.)”
The modern e-cigarette was invented by a 52 year-old Chinese pharmacist in 2003 and didn’t appear in the U.S. until 2006. It was then that “a gap emerged in the lexicon, as a word was needed to describe this activity, and distinguish it from ‘smoking’. The word “vape
arose to fill this gap, and it has proliferated along with the habit,” the Oxford experts wrote in a blog post announcing this year’s winning word.
Oxford Dictionaries chooses its word of the year with the help of software that scans the Web for emerging linquistic trends. But the final choice is made by humans, including the dictionary’s editors who flag words that they notice popping up in their own day-to-day reading and conversation.
Use of the word “vape” has more than doubled in 2014 over last year, according to the Oxford blog post. It has even spawned the retronym “tobacco cigarette” to distinguish an e-cigarette from what was once a plain old cigarette. Traditional cigarettes are also referred to as “analogue” or “hot cigarette.”
Other words used by the e-cig in-crowd include: throat hit (the tingly feeling in the throat the user gets when vaporizing juice that has nicotine,) e-juice (the liquid that turns to vapor), carto (short for cartomizer, a disposable cartridge that holds the e-juice), vaporium (a place to buy e-cigarettes).
As the tenth word of the year chosen by Oxford since it began the tradition in 2004, vape joins other cultural-moment capturing coinages like “locavore” (2007), “GIF” (2012) and last year’s “selfie.”
Gail Sullivan covers business for the Morning Mix blog.
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