The Collins Dictionary has officially announced their ten-word annual shortlist for words of 2021 and NFT has been named their word of the year, surpassing words like crypto, metaverse, and hybrid work, among others
Word of the Year 2021
The Collins Dictionary has officially announced their ten-word annual shortlist for word of 2021, as well as announcing that NFT — though technically understood to be an abbreviation for the nonfungible token — has been named their word of the year, surpassing words like crypto, metaverse, and hybrid work, among others.
The blog post spoke candidly about the prospect of a digital revolution fueled by a “convergence of money and the internet,” which aims to challenge and evolve traditional payment methods into the twenty-first century.
An NFT is defined by Collins Dictionary as “a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record the ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible,” and it was also noted in their blog post that NFTs signify:
“A chunk of digital data that records who a piece of digital work belongs to… what’s really captured the public’s imagination around NFTs is the use of this technology to sell art.”
BREAKING NEWS The Collins Word of the Year is… NFT.
Find out more about #CollinsWOTY 2021 and see the full list here: https://t.co/gmsnCqA0yv#wordoftheyear #CollinsDictionary #NFT pic.twitter.com/XPhUM7oIoZ— Collins Dictionary (@CollinsDict) November 24, 2021
The institution named infamous NFT artist Beeple as a significant contributor to the space, and unsurprisingly mentioned his landmark magnum opus, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold for a market-high of $69 million in March this year, the third-highest physical or digital art sale in history.
A look at NFT Growth
Over the last year, the NFT market has grown at an exponential rate, attracting a flood of celebrities, influencers, and Web 3 enthusiasts. CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Cool Cats are just a few of the collections that have captured the essence of the Twitter-native profile picture project (pfp) space.
Furthermore, the emergence of NFT auctions by traditional auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s is providing a global pedal stool to drive adoption, a theme shared by CoinGecko’s Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Bobby Ong, in a recent interview with Cointelegraph.
As of Q4 2021, overall sales of collectible and art NFTs had topped $7.4 billion. In comparison, at the start of this year, art and collectible sales totaled $17.8 million and $55.5 million, respectively, figures that appear incomprehensible in today’s thriving market.
For more context on the NFT inclusion, Oxford Dictionary recently named Vax their prestigious word of the year, a symbol of the significant impact Covid-19, and subsequent vaccination programs, have had on the world over the last two years.
With the introduction of Bitcoin in August 2013, the Oxford Dictionary debuted cryptocurrency terminology in their online edition for the first time. Just under a year later, the term cryptocurrency followed suit, and more recently, Satoshi joined the exclusive group of linguistic arbitrators.
