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NFT is Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year

“NFTs seem to be everywhere, from the arts sections to the financial pages and in galleries and auction houses and across social media platforms. Whether the NFT will have a lasting influence is yet to be determined, but it’s sudden presence in conversations around the world makes it very clearly our word of the year.”

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This article is also available in Tagalog: ‘NFT’, ‘Word of the Year’ ng Collins Dictionary

By Shiela Bertillo

Following the digital markets’ huge wave this year, the abbreviation of non-fungible token, NFT, beats crypto and metaverse as the top word of the 2021.

NFT is named as the word of the year by dictionary publisher Collins according to its blog post published on Wednesday, November 24. 

“A unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible,” is what Collins Dictionary defines as NFT.

The lexicographers, who monitor the 4.5bn-word Collins Corpus to choose their word of the year, stated that they went for NFT because it demonstrates a “unique technicolour collision of art, technology and commerce” that has “broken through the Covid noise” to become global.

“It’s unusual for an abbreviation to experience such a meteoric rise in usage, but the data we have from the Collins Corpus reflects the remarkable ascendancy of the NFT in 2021,” said Alex Beecroft, Collins Learning managing director.

He also noted how NFT is prevalent this year.

“NFTs seem to be everywhere, from the arts sections to the financial pages and in galleries and auction houses and across social media platforms. Whether the NFT will have a lasting influence is yet to be determined, but it’s sudden presence in conversations around the world makes it very clearly our word of the year.” Beecroft added.

Consequently, NFT beat two other tech-based words on Collins’ shortlist of 10 words of the year: crypto and metaverse.

Taking only the 4th spot is Crypto, the short form of cryptocurrency, which according to Collins has a usage percentage of 468% year on year.

Metaverse, only ranked at 7th, is a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash that describes a three-dimensional virtual world. And due to Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding of his Facebook company to Meta,  the usage of metaverse has increased 12-fold since 2020.

In the Philippines, several personalities and groups have explored and rode the NFT waves  such as Nadine Lustre, Heart Evangelista, Pia Wurtzbach, Miss Universe Philippines, National Book Development Board (NBDB), Team Manila, and a group of artists called Mask on Buttons are among the Filipinos who joined the wave by releasing their own or participating in an NFT project.  

This article is published on BitPinas: NFT is Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year

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