‘Vape’ smokes the competition to nab Oxford ‘Word of the Year’

Oxford Dictionaries has revealed its official international Word of the Year 2014, culled from a shortlist of the trendiest utterances from the last 12 months.

And this year’s winner is (drumroll) … “vape.” (Cymbal crash!)

To vape, for the uninformed or those otherwise living in an underground bunker somewhere, is to smoke an electronic cigarette, a battery powered gizmo that heats a nicotine-laced solution into a vapor that the smoker inhales. Hence, the shortening of vapor into the word “vape” by its aficionados, and which can be both a verb referring to the act of smoking and a noun referring to the e-cigarette itself.

E-cigarettes were invented in 2003 by a Chinese pharmacist whose father died of lung cancer, with the aim of creating a healthy alternative of sorts to the real McCoy. Fast-forward a decade and they’ve circled the globe, becoming a multi-billion dollar industry and a common sight in hipster enclaves the world over.

Judy Pearsall, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, explains the choice of winner. “As vaping has gone mainstream, with celebrities from Lindsay Lohan to Barry Manilow giving it a go, and with growing public debate on the public dangers and the need for regulation, so the language usage of the word ‘vape’ and related terms in 2014 has shown a marked increase,” she said in a blog post on OxfordDictionaries.com.

Incidentally, Pearsall did not mention whether the world has reached peak vape now that the likes of Barry Manilow and Lindsay Lohan are on board.

The word “vape” was added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2014, though it hasn’t yet been included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But it has, according to the Oxford Dictionaries blog, spurred a veritable vaping lexicon of sorts. For instance, there’s the word “vaporium,” a place where one can vape and/or purchase vape-related equipment; “e-juice,” which is the nicotine-spiked liquid that is heated to become the inhalable vapor that one, well, vapes; and “carto,” an abbreviation of cartomizer, the disposable cartridge containing said e-juice. Though the latter sounds to this reporter like a distinctly regional (British?) rendering.

Vape was part of a shortlist of potential winning words for 2014, which included the likes of “bae,” a term of endearment for a romantic partner, which Oxford says “originated in African-American English” and has been thrust into worldwide popularity “through social media and lyrics in hip-hop and R&B music.”

Also on the shortlist was “budtender,” which is a person who works at a marijuana dispensary. No word on whether that gig is included in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual survey at the fastest-growing American careers, but perhaps it should be.

Other finalists included “contactless,” referring to technologies that allow wireless or mobile payments such as with a smart card or a mobile phone, and “normcore,” a style of dressing in which the wearer is deliberately unfashionable.

Then there was “slacktivism,” a pejorative for low-effort participation in social or political activism that gratifies the ego of the “slactivist” more than it benefits the cause, and “indyref,” the portmanteau abbreviation for this summer’s referendum on Scottish independence, which served as the hashtag for tweets about the vote.

“It signals the increased impact that social media is having on our language,” according to the Oxford Dictionaries blog, “as brevity becomes paramount on platforms with message length restrictions.”