NFT (Non-Fungible Token) has just been named the buzzword of 2021 by the Collins Dictionary.
At the turn of 2021, Collins Dictionary declared NFT as the Word of the Year, and it just shows how far we've come with blockchain technology over the past 10 years. Mass adoption occurred in the cryptocurrency, technology and arts industry.
This year, NFT exploded in popularity and attracted the attention of investors, art lovers, enthusiasts, technophiles or gamers from all over the world.
According to Collins, an NFT is "a unique digital certificate registered in a blockchain, used to prove the ownership of an asset such as artwork or collectibles".
In 2021 the word NFT completely squashed its main competitor COVID19 and saw increased usage of 11,000% compared to 2020, although COVID19 was still close to the top, we've started seeing other words like Crypto, Metaverse, Play-to-earn, and DEFI reaching the top 10 list.
In 2020, "Lockdown" was chosen as the Word of the Year when the Covid-19 pandemic appeared and raged everywhere in the world. Alex Beecroft, CEO of Collins Learning, said: "It's been an unusual growth for an acronym used during the year. The data we've collected reflects NFT's tremendous growth in 2021. NFTs have appeared everywhere from art, finance, galleries, auctions to social media platforms."
NFT's started rocking the world when singer Grimes sold her collection of digital artworks for £4.4 million. Today's most valuable NFT collage is "Everydays: The First 5000 days" which was created by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) and sold for a whopping $70m..
In addition to NFT, two other technology keywords also in the top 10 are "Crypto" (cryptocurrency) and "Metaverse" (virtual universe). In which, the popularity of Crypto increased by 468% compared to last year.
The Collins Dictionary dates back to 1824 and currently records more than 4.5 billion words. Every year, Collins publishes a list of the most popular words based on their statistical tools on the Internet with the purpose of showing trends and interest levels of users around the world with certain topics in the Internet during one year.