Maru, the cat

You may remember these "words of the year" . . .

Truthiness (2005)

WMD (2002) weapons of mass destruction

Y2K (1999)

Not! (1992)

The Oxford American Dictionary chooses a word every year as "word of the year".

I remember all those above and actually knew what they meant or where they originated at the time, but this year, when I read the "word of the year", I realized again that I'm out of touch.

This year's winner is GIF.

What?

Don't know what that stands for?  It has apparently been around for about 25 years and means "graphic interchange format".  It was a noun, but now it's also a verb sort of like google.  Which, by the way, was never chosen as a "word of the year"?!

Oh, that's because it was chosen as "word of the decade".  Well, that's more like it.

I would have thought the "word of the year" might have been meme or maybe zeitgeist.

Google it.

According to wikipedia, a GIF is:

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; /ˈdʒɪf/ or /ˈɡɪf/) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987[1] and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. The colors are chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between the patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard. All the relevant patents have now expired.

Now you know what a GIF is.  Or like me, you still don't.

So, a picture (or video) is worth a thousand words.  I think this is one example of a GIF.

And I think this is one example of an animated GIF.

Then click on any of the Maru videos because they will make you smile.