As 2014 draws to a close, it’s time to look back and see which words have been significant throughout the past twelve months, and to announce the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. Without further ado, we can exclusively reveal that the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014 is…. 站在2014的尾巴上，是时候回顾一下在过去的12个月里最有影响力的单词，宣布其为年度牛津词典词王。我们可以当即宣布2014年度牛津词典单词仅属于……
Vape 吸电子烟
Although there is a shortlist of strong contenders, it was vape that emerged victorious as Word of the Year. 虽然有力的竞争者有一大单，年度单词的胜利还是归属于‘vape(吸电子烟)’。
What does vape mean? Vape是什么意思?
So, what does vape mean? It originated as an abbreviation of vapour or vaporize. The OxfordDictionaries.com definition was added in August 2014: the verb means ‘to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device’, while both the device and the action can also be known as a vape. The associated noun vaping is also listed. 那么，vape是啥意思呢?它源于vapour(蒸汽)或vaporizer(蒸发)的缩写。其释义于2014年8月录入牛津词典网：动词的意思为“吸入或呼出电子烟亦或相似装置的蒸汽”，且装置和吸呼的动作也可被称作“vape”。相关名词vaping也被提名了。
Why was vape chosen? 为什么选择vape?
As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vape has grown significantly in popularity. 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. 随着电子烟(简写为e-cigs)越来越普及，吸电子烟也被变得越来越大众。你发现vape这个单词出现的频率比两年前高出30倍，也比去年用的频率翻了一倍。
Usage of vape peaked in April 2014 – as the graph below indicates – around the time that the UK’s first ‘vape café’ (The Vape Lab in Shoreditch, London) opened its doors, and protests were held in response to New York City banning indoor vaping. In the same month, the issue of vaping was debated by The Washington Post, the BBC, and the British newspaper The Telegraph, amongst others. 如下图显示，Vape的使用频率到2014年4月到达顶峰。英国的第一家”吸电子烟咖啡厅”(位于伦敦肖迪奇的“吸电子烟实验室”)在此时开张，针对纽约禁止室内抽电子烟的抗议也被发起。在同月，吸电子烟的问题被华盛顿邮报、BBC和英国电讯报及其他媒体争相讨论。
The language of vaping vaping的语言
Vape is also the modifier for other nouns, creating new compound nouns which are growing in popularity. The most common of these are vape pen and vape shop, and there is also recent evidence for vape lounge, vape fluid, vape juice, and others. Related coinages include e-juice, carto, and vaporium – as well as the retronym tobacco cigarette for traditional cigarettes. (A retronym is a new term created from an existing word in order to distinguish the original word from a later development – for example, acoustic guitar developing after the advent of the electric guitar.)
You may be surprised to learn that the word vaping existed before the phenomenon. Although e-cigarettes weren’t commercially available until the 21st century, a 1983 article in New Society entitled ‘Why do People Smoke?’ contains the first known usage of the term. The author, Rob Stepney, described what was then a hypothetical device:
“an inhaler or ‘non-combustible’ cigarette, looking much like the real thing, but…delivering a metered dose of nicotine vapour. (The new habit, if it catches on, would be known as vaping.)” “一只吸入器或者说“不可燃烟”看上去和真货没差，但是……输出了一定剂量的尼古丁蒸汽。(这个新嗜好，如果流行起来，就会被称为vaping。)”
However, despite these early beginnings, Oxford Dictionaries research shows that it wasn’t until 2009 that this sense of vape (and vaping) started to appear regularly in mainstream sources. 然而，尽管这个嗜好很早就有了，牛津词典调查研究显示直到2009年vape(和vaping)这个词才固定的出现在主流媒体中。
