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Have you been seeing everyone puff water vapor at bars this year? You're not alone. e-cigarettes and marijuana have become so popular that "vape" was just named word of the year.
The Oxford Dictionaries name its top word every year, and they're usually pretty good at predicting what has staying power. Last year, they picked "selfie" as their top term, and that's certainly stuck around.
They define vape as "to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device," but note that vape can refer to an e-cigarette as well as the act of smoking it.
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The word has exploded in popularity in 2014, thanks to a booming market in e-cigarettes. But marijuana vaporizers also make up a huge chunk of the vaping trend. Marijuana legalization was a huge news story this year and is even responsible for the term budtender, a runner-up word of the year for 2014.
That, combined with tobacco, make those little devices inescapable. "You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year," Oxford noted in a blog post.
Oxford also named several runner-up words. Here's hoping that because "bae" didn't make it to Word of the Year status, it'll go away sometime soon:
Originally published at Cosmopolitan.