AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The Global Language monitor said its annual survey of the English language dubbed the heart emoji symbol as the Top Word for 2014.

The Austin-based language group, which "analyzes and catalogs the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture," said the heart emoji, an ideograph meaning "love," appeared billions of times around the world to become the first ideograph to be chosen as the Top Word of the Year.


"Each emoji represents an emotion, expression, or state of mind, or a person, place or thing, so much so, that we see the birth of the AlphaBorg or AlphaBit," said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.

"The English Language is now undergoing a remarkable transformation unlike any in its 1400 year history -- its system of writing, the Alphabet, is gaining characters at amazing rate. These character are ideographs or pictographs that are called emoji and emoticons. There are about a thousand emoji characters now officially recognized by Unicode Consortium, the official keepers of coding that forms the basis of the Internet. They regularly review new suggestions with the next 37 or so being finalized for June 2015. Then the new emoji can be embedded in any number of devices for any number of languages. "The AlphaBIT now includes letters, numbers, the diacritical marks that compose emoticons, as well as clever electronic solutions that provide real-time access to more than hundreds of emoji."

The Global Language Monitor said other words making its list of 2014's top terms included "hashtag," "vape," "blood moon," "nano," "photo bomb," "caliphate," "(white) privilege," "bae" and "'bash' tag."