'Hardwork' chosen as 'hot' word of the year

Fen, the Chinese word for "hardwork", was chosen as the hottest character related to domestic topics in 2018, while the hottest character related to international topics is tui, meaning "withdraw", according to a news release from the Ministry of Education on Friday.

They are among a list of popular words and phrases collected during a campaign that assessed characters used by Chinese-language media. Organizers included the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center and the Commercial Press.

The campaign received thousands of suggested characters and words by netizens nationwide since it started on Nov 20. It is the 13th time the lists were published.