If you’ve ever been confused about the meaning of an emoji someone sends you, now you can look its up definition in the dictionary.
Dictionary.com added a number of emoji and slang to its site Tuesday, making it the first dictionary to include emoji descriptions. More than just your standard definition, the emoji pages not only explain what an emoji means, but also dig a little deeper to explain where the emoji comes from and who uses it, as well as examples of the emoji in use.
For instance, the site says that the “face without a mouth” emoji “can be used as an emotional-tone marker to indicate sadness, loneliness, disappointment, emptiness, and genuine self-deprecation. It can also be used more literally as speechlessness or to represent zipping one’s lips. In some uses, it’s a symbolic marker for sheepishness.”
Emoji added to the site include the eggplant, eyes, upside-down face, red heart, face with rolling eyes, grinning face with smiling eyes, face without mouth, face with tears of joy, fire, and pile of poo.
The added slang includes adulting (describes acting like a grown up), ‘bye Felicia (a dismissive term used to bid someone farewell), cuck (a derogatory term for an inadequate man), Hey Girl (a reference to a Ryan Gosling meme), Netflix and chill (the act of watching Netflix with an expectation of sexual activity), and rickrolling (when you troll someone on the internet by linking to Rick Astley’s hit song ‘Never Going to Give You Up’).
“We’re constantly identifying new terms and the nuanced ways that English speakers are using them to ensure Dictionary.com evolves along with language,“ Jane Solomon, linguist-in-residence at Dictionary.com said in a statement. “Emoji have developed from their 12×12 pixel origins on early Japanese cellphones to the major cross-cultural mode of expression they are today. Their use is loaded with meaning, and it’s part of our job as lexicographers to capture this meaning as best we can.”
And yes, that means that the definition for the eggplant emoji acknowledges that it can be meant to represent the vegetable, but also that it’s often used to represent a specific male body part as well.
Earlier this month, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary added 850 new words and definitions to its online dictionary, including a number of words related to cyrptocurrencies, including the word “cryptocurrency” and the term “initial coin offering” (a sort of initial public offering for digital tokens).
