It's been delighting people around the world for 25 years but now formally holds a honored place in the cultural lexicon: "GIF" has been chosen as word of the year by the Oxford American Dictionary.

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President Barack Obama took sides on one of the most divisive debates in the history of the English language this week by declaring that the word “GIF” — an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format —is ...

Donald Trump is our brains on GIFs. Many people who are thoughtful and analytical have a hard time understanding the appeal of Trump's empty but crowd-roiling provocations. But think about the ...

Staphylococcal and GIF were the most mispronounced words for Texas and New Mexico, respectively in 2025, according to ...

Animation by Slate. Yawning cat via Giphy. Recently Adam Leibsohn, the COO of the GIF platform Giphy, made his case that GIFs are superior to words as a medium of communication. Could this possibly be ...

Oxford American Dictionaries announced that the Word of the Year for 2012 is the verb form of GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format and pronounced as “Jif” at its inception (but now with either a ...

GIF, used as a verb, is the Oxford American Dictionaries’ word of the year. The dictionary company announced the pick with an animated GIF. The word of the year is “chosen annually as a word that has ...

“Higgs Boson” was a contender. So were “superstorm,” “Super PAC” and “YOLO” (an acronym that stands for You Only Live Once). But Katherine Martin, head of the U.S. dictionaries program at Oxford ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about how to do more with your consumer gadgets. Since I initially covered its release, Microsoft Word Flow remains my ...

Don't worry — if you don't know what the word "GIF" means, now you can look it up in the Oxford American Dictionary, which just named the 25-year-old acronym, which stands for "graphic interchange ...