Vape continues to gain steam with its selection as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year just months after the verb was added to the online lexicon in August, the publishers said.

Beating out a shortlist of contenders including budtender (a person who serves customers in a cannabis dispensary) and normcore (wearing unfashionable clothing as a fashion statement), vape was picked because it is charging into popular use. “You are 30 times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago”, publishers said.
Rob Stepney, author of a 1983 article published in New Society is credited by Oxford Dictionaries with first use of the word. Stepney described what then was a hypothetical device as “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.)”