Why is there a quote mark on the word "word" in the title of the article?

They are drawing attention to the fact that the OED has chosen a symbol as the “word” of the year. It’s not a word. It’s a symbol.

So, it should say it in the title an emoji not emoji. I guess that is what is wrong, and as the interviewer said “but it’s not a word!”

But they did not choose “emoji” as the word of the year. They chose an actual emoji itself. They chose the symbol. They did not choose the word which that symbol represents.

Leaving out the “an” is not an error, but you’re right, it can create confusion. It is typical to leave articles like “an” or “the” out of headlines. This sometimes makes headlines into ambiguous sentences. Journalists sacrifice clarity for brevity in headline writing.

Single quotation marks are used in newspaper headlines when quotation marks are required..

:’-) is the “word” of the year.

Back in the days when rocks were soft, dinosaurs ruled the earth, and typesetting was an actual job that involved placing letters in a pan, journalists decided brevity was the soul of not-killing-one’s-typesetter, and letters that could be sacrificed, were. Some of the words that were sacrificed were articles in headlines.

Today’s headline:

Seek Seeking Brevity Slashes Articles

That high school journalism class is paying off.

There was also the matter of compacting the wording to get the message across in the largest letters possible.

Edited
@dappled_leaves According to your post, whenever you make an error, it’s not an error, it’s just others’ fault for not figuring out what you must have meant to say or do.

@flo Not at all. I’m simply explaining that the newspaper left out the word “an” on purpose. They didn’t leave it out by accident.

@dappled_leaves You sound like you’re one of the decision makers at the paper, or something if you’re that sure.

They must want to degrade the quality of the newspaper, if they want it to look bad, ’‘confusing’’, to use your words.

@flo I didn’t create the concept of the headline, I promise. Pick up any newspaper and read the headlines: this is how they are designed. They leave out most of the little connecting words, like “a”, “the”, “and”, etc. Surely you’ve noticed this before?

Stop it, you two.

Oxford Dictionaries lists emoji as a noun, without need of the indefinite article, an.

Open the OD link and read the example sentences shaded in gray.

@dappled_leaves So, you mean other newspapers are of very bad quality, so they just want to degrade the quality of their newspaper on purpose or they just are led like sheep. Either one doesn’t make sense.

@ibstubro an emoji is a drawing, or an icon, a representation of a word in the computer world. Emoji is a word. The 1st 2 paragraphs of the newspaper:
”Oxford Dictionaries has rarely been perfect in its choice of the word of the year, although at least in previous years its choice has been, you know, a word. Not this time.”

“Instead of picking an actual word that you could find in an actual dictionary, Oxford Dictionaries has declared the word of the year to be an emoji – specifically, the “face with tears of joy” emoji.”

Has your question been answered @flo?

I believe so, @Stinley