VAPE – inhaling vapour produced by an electronic cigarette – is officially the international word of the year.

Over the past five years the sale of electronic cigarettes has become a multi-million pound industry and the habit has gone mainstream.

Now they’ve received the ultimate accolade from Oxford Dictionaires editors.

The battery-run devices “vapourise” flavoured water containing nicotine that smokers then breathe in.

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Oxford Dictionaries editorial director Judy Pearsall said the word was needed to distinguish the practice from smoking.

She added: “As vaping has gone mainstream, with celebrities from Lindsay Lohan to Barry Manilow giving it a go, and with growing public debate on the dangers and the need for regulation, so the usage of the word ‘vape’ and related terms in 2014 has shown a marked increase.”

When used as a verb, vape means inhaling and exhaling the vapour produced by e-cigarettes, while it can also be used as a noun to refer to the devices themselves.

Research found use of the word has more than doubled since 2013.

Other shortlisted words this year include ‘budtender’, a person serving customers in a cannabis shop, and ‘normcore’, a trend in which ordinary, unfashionable clothing is worn as a deliberate fashion statement.

Oxford English Dictionaries editors help to choose the words of the year but they are not exclusively chosen by OED editors as Walton Street-based Oxford University Press publishes many different dictionaries.

Last year’s Oxford Dictionaries’ international word of the year was ‘selfie’, “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, with a smartphone or webcam, and shared via social media”.

The previous year the UK word of the year was ‘omnishambles’, meaning “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterised by a string of blunders and miscalculations”.

Earlier this year ex-smokers Phillip Shulman and son Daniel Greenall told how they invested in e-cigarettes by setting up shops in Corn Street, Witney, Stert Street, Abingdon, and a sales unit in Templars Square shopping centre in Cowley, Oxford.

Mr Greenall said: “I’m not surprised vape is now such a popular word – e-cigarettes have really taken off.”

 

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