Vape wins Oxford Dictionaries 2014 Word of the Year a week after UK TV airs its ecigarette advert featuring vaping
It's that time of year again. The Oxford Dictionaries famed Word the Year is finally out. This year's winner was "vape" and is defined as the following:
To inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.
Vape won out thanks to the explosive rise of ecigarettes in the UK and across the world in the last few years. In June, a Harvard study estimated that 29m Europeans have tried an ecigarette.
In 2013, ecigarette sales for the UK rocketed 340 per cent year-on-year, overtaking nicotine patches for the first time. There are now an estimated 1.3m ecigarette users in the UK alone.
The Oxford Dictionaries says people are 30 times more likely to come across the word vape than they were two years ago. Oxford Dictionaries uses software to look through roughly 150m words in use each month to find their winner.
However,vape faced stiff competition from slacktivism and indyref to be crowned word of the year for 2014.
Judy Pearsall, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, said:
As vaping has gone mainstream and with growing public debate on the public dangers and the need for regulation, the language usage of the word vape and related terms in 2014 has shown a marked increase.
Last week, ITV aired the first advert for ecigarettes where the actor vaped on a VIP ecig: