Why is 'NFT' the Collins Dictionary's word of the year?

NFT, the more commonly used abbreviated version of non-fungible token, is Collins Dictionary’s word of the year.

The use of the term, which has entered the mainstream lately, increased 11,000% in 2021.

Collins describes NFT as “a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible.” More simply put, “it’s a chunk of digital data that records who a piece of digital work belongs to,” author David Shariatmadari writes.

“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,” says Collins Learning managing director Alex Beecroft. “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 its sudden presence in conversations around the world makes it very clearly our word of the year.”

The buzz around NFTs, which remain difficult to really define, has been unrelenting over the last 12 months.

They are grabbing headlines because they are raking in big bucks. In March, surrealist digital artist Beeple made history by selling an NFT of his piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days—a collage of all the images he’d created since he committed in 2007 to making one every day—at Christie’s for a cool $69 million. NFTs for both the viral YouTube video Charlie Bit Me and meme art Nyan Cat sold for more than half a million dollars.

Moreover, entertainment kingpins are quickly embracing the new fad. Several celebrities, like filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, professional wrestler John Cena, and rapper A$AP Rocky, among others, have lined up to release NFTs. Film studio Warner Bros has started rebuilding the Matrix franchise as NFTs. The 2021 Oscars swag bag even included an NFT tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman of Black Panther fame. And its use cases go further.

Unlike traditional art that circulates among the super wealthy, NFTs have become a democratic force to be reckoned with. “NFTs have opened the door for art buying and selling for the masses,” writes Motley Fool’s Nicholas Rossolillo.

The emerging industry has given a new lease of life to starving artists. “Five years ago, I was struggling to pay the mortgage,” Trevor Jones, a 51-year-old painter from Edinburgh who began making NFT art in 2019, told the Guardian. “I went from having to borrow money from friends to pay the bills to making $4 million in a day.”

NFT is one of three tech-based words to make Collins’ longer list of ten words of the year. The others are metaverse—the concept Facebook steadfastly committed to, and even changed its name for—and crypto, the slang for cryptocurrency.

This year’s list is also inundated with pandemic vernacular, and there’s one word pertaining to the climate crisis—a fitting contender at the heels of COP26.

Collins word of the year is a departure from its 2020 selection—lockdown—but for the Oxford Dictionary, the covid hangover continued as it declared “vax” the word of the year. Meanwhile, the Cambridge Dictionary made an out-of-this world choice with “perseverance” after a spike of searches—it was looked up more than 243,000 times this year—partially because of NASA’s Perseverance Rover making its final descent to Mars in February.