26/11/2021 'NFT' is Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2021, beating out 'crypto' and 'cheugy'
"NFT," the abbreviation of "non-fungible token," has been namedWord of the Yearby dictionary publisherCollins, beating "crypto" and "cheugy" to the top spot.
An NFT is "a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible," according to a blog post from Collins, published Wednesday.
Acting like virtual signatures, NFTs prove the authenticity of an artwork as the blockchain serves as incorruptible proof of ownership, meaning that "original" artworks and their owners can always be identified via the blockchain, even if an image or video is widely replicated.
They also provide scarcity, and as a result thedigital art markethas been booming.
In March, a digital artwork named "Everydays: The First 5000 days"sold for $69.3 millionvia Christie's, making its creator, graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, one of the art market's most valuable living artists.
The idea of a digital revolution is also captured in another of the dictionary's candidates for Word of the Year: "crypto," short for "cryptocurrency," digital money that is challenging traditional forms of money, according to Collins.
It also named "metaverse" in its blog post, following Facebook's announcement that it would change its corporate name to Meta.
Other selected words reflect the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, with "double-vaxxed" and "hybrid working" making the shortlist.
"Climate anxiety" reflects growing concern about the damage humans are doing to the planet, while "neopronoun" is a way of referring to a person without using their name or traditional markers of gender, such as "he" and "she." Collins gives "xe," "ze" and "ve" as examples of neopronouns.
Rounding out the shortlist are "Regencycore," which is defined as a fashion aesthetic inspired by the Georgian-era clothing seen in the Netflix show "Bridgerton," and "cheugy," which is used to say that something is out of date or uncool.
In 2020, Collins named "lockdown" its Word of the Year, for obvious reasons, and, earlier this month, Oxford Languages made "vax" its pick for 2021.
Defined as "a colloquialism meaning either vaccine or vaccination as a noun and vaccinate as a verb," vax was relatively rare until this year, the company, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, said.
In September, vax appeared more than 72 times more frequently than the year before, said Oxford Languages, which analyzes news content to track changes in the English language.
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https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/nft-word-of-the-year-collins-scli-intl-gbr/index.html
Interesting NFTs
CryptoPunk #3011
The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. Originally, they could be claimed for free by anybody with an Ethereum wallet, but all 10,000 were quickly claimed. Now they must be purchased from someone via the marketplace that's also embedded in the blockchain.
Gollum
Shalom! I'm Gollum. All you need to know about me is I hate cereal with a passion. I'm often described as fabulous, and I own it. We're so fur-tunate to have found each other!
#53922
By
OthersideDeployer
The Harvest
An anthropomorphic figure stands, wide eyed, staring at the viewer; its body masculine, muscular, and humanoid. Its “mind” dissociates into a conglomerate of structures resembling feathers, grain, teeth–as well as a radial flower “node”, casting linear rays throughout the composition.
To his left, a vat of bodies gesture and writhe in a kind of amniotic soup, attended by a video game robot. The bot's red display reads “uWu”.
Behind the robot and filling the left side of the composition is an archaic figure composed of a variety of vintage objects and symbols. Among them are a hardbound book with ancient cuneiform scripts, indicating barley, beer, bread, ox, house, and sky, behind which is a grimacing, salivating jagged toothed maw; and an old Commodore floppy drive. The figure’s head tilts toward an illuminated crescent moon, suggesting the Egyptian Sacred Bull.
The archaic figure is composed of a variety of mutating cells, which shift in color, and pattern; eventually breaking free into an ephemeral broadcast of bubbles which move across the background.
The work came into being against a psychological introspection, which included associations to pop culture such as alien abduction and pod people, as well as quite a bit of reflection on grains as a symbol of civilization, agriculture, sustenance, life, and imbibing (mainly whiskies).
CryptoPunk #5822
By
C352B5