It features a visual presentation of “Happy” advertised as being “the world’s first 24-hour music video.” The video was directed by the French directing team We Are from LA with creative director Yoann Lemoine, and shot by steadicam operator Jon Beattie. In France, “Happy” spent 22 weeks at No. 1, the longest reign at the top of the Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique, beating Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5”, which spent 20 weeks at No. 1 in 1999. It spent a total of 22 weeks in the top 10, entering on the week-ending February 15, 2014 and departing on July 19, 2014. The song also holds the record for the second-highest audience peak for a week on the Hot 100 Airplay with 225.9 million impressions, while Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, a song in which Pharrell was featured as well as produced and co-wrote, holds the all-time record.
Getting started
Yankovic recorded the song as one of the last on Mandatory Fun, and received Williams’ approval directly, through email. The song mocks questionable style in fashion as well as activities considered gauche. It was reported on September 19, 2014, that seven of the individuals in the Iranian video had been handed sentences, suspended for three years, of 91 lashes each along with jail by Iranian courts. According to a police chief, the song represented vulgarity and also hurt public chastity. The video soon became popular in Albania and caused controversy over the usage of images of Albanian First Secretary Enver Hoxha.
The historical English dictionary
It was the best-selling song of 2014 in the United States with 6.45 million copies sold for the year, as well as in the United Kingdom with 1.5 million copies sold for the year. To add happy to a word list please sign up or log in. Happy combines the implications of lucky and fortunate with stress on being blessed. Lucky, fortunate, happy, providential mean meeting with unforeseen success. The talks came less than a week after the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a high-profile raid in Caracas.
The song was reissued on December 16, 2013, by Back Lot Music under exclusive license to Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music. Add happy to one of your lists below, or create a new one. Middle English happy “having or being good luck,” a specialized sense of hap “chance, chance occurrence” — related to happen, mishap, perhaps Felicitous suggests an aptness that is opportune, telling, or graceful. Happy suggests what is effectively or successfully appropriate.
- How is the word happy different from other adjectives like it?
- It lets you tame the happy ghast and ride it around the overworld.
- President Donald Trump met with top US oil and gas executives at the White House on Friday, urging them to commit billions of dollars toward rebuilding and expanding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.
- It then spent four weeks climbing before finally reaching No. 1 on December 29, becoming the final UK number one single of 2013.
- Once players have crafted the happy ghast saddle, they need to simply approach the mob to place and equip it.
- When might lucky be a better fit than happy?
I told Chris to listen to the song in his car, that if he didn’t like ‘Happy,’ I didn’t know what to give him. After nine different songs, recorded fully, they were like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ So I went back and wrote ‘Happy.’ I didn’t have the melody, just the chorus. Pharrell told W Magazine that “Happy” came after he unsuccessfully pitched Despicable Me 2 producer Chris Meledandri on some other songs he’d written.
- Some common synonyms of happy are fortunate, lucky, and providential.
- Felicitous suggests an aptness that is opportune, telling, or graceful.
- Access our word lists and commentaries on an array of fascinating topics, from film-based coinages to Tex-Mex terms.
- The song mocks questionable style in fashion as well as activities considered gauche.
- Happy suggests what is effectively or successfully appropriate.
- They also made Williams an offer to record his own album, to which he agreed quickly, “overwhelmed that someone wanted to know what’s in my heart”.
AI Search Assistant
“Happy” is repeated 56 times over the course of the song. Here you can find a series of commentaries on the History of English, charting the history of the English language from Old English to the present day. In 2014, American musician “Weird Al” Yankovic parodied “Happy” as “Tacky” on his fourteenth studio album Mandatory Fun.
Chart performance
On June 12, it was announced that “Happy” had overtaken “Evergreen” by Will Young as the UK’s best-selling single of the 21st century, with sales of 1.81 million. It became Williams’ third No. 1 song in Britain, counting “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines”, where he appeared as a featured artist. It went on to finish number five on the year-end Single Top 40 list, giving Williams three songs in the top five, along with “Blurred Lines” and “Get Lucky”, both of which feature him. The song was nominated for Best Original Song at the 86th Academy Awards on March 2, 2014, but lost to “Let It Go” from Frozen.
Word of the day
If you are interested in looking up a particular word, the best way to do that is to use the search box at the top of every OED page. Access our word lists and commentaries on an array of fascinating topics, from film-based coinages to Tex-Mex terms. Read our collection of word stories detailing the etymology and semantic development of a wide range of words, including ‘dungarees’, ‘codswallop’, and ‘witch’. An unsurpassed guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.
For strangers, I think you’ve got three days to wish people a Happy New Year before it starts getting weird. My first inclination was one week after we all cracked open our new The Far Side desk calendars. We’re just under a week happy jokers casino into 2026, and it still has that new year smell (or funk, depending on how it has been going for you). (Definition of happy from the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)
The song soared to #1 in 35 countries—it was the best selling song of 2014. Sign up to receive the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day email every day. Example queries I can run are “Which words in English are borrowed from French?”, “Which words were first used by Charles Dickens?” or “How are words added to the dictionary?”.
It then spent four weeks climbing before finally reaching No. 1 on December 29, becoming the final UK number one single of 2013. Once players have crafted the happy ghast saddle, they need to simply approach the mob to place and equip it. The happy ghast saddle in Minecraft, or the harness, is a unique item added as part of the Chase the Skies game drop that allows players to tame and ride a floating happy ghast and turn it into an aerial mode of transport.
How to craft the happy ghast saddle in Minecraft
This made Williams only the second artist in UK chart history (the first being the Beatles) to have three singles sell 1 million copies in under a year, as well as only the third artist ever to have three million-sellers, along with the Beatles (who have six) and Rihanna (who has four). In October 2013, a month prior to its single release, “Happy” catapulted to No. 1 on the Dutch Top 40 chart in the Netherlands, partially as a result of radio station 3FM airplay and subsequent online downloads, as well as featuring in a Transavia commercial. Williams originally wrote the song for CeeLo Green and felt Green’s recording of the song was better, but Elektra Records, Green’s record label, decided against it since he was on the verge of releasing his Christmas album, Cee Lo’s Magic Moment. Williams provided vocals for French duo Daft Punk’s 2013 album Random Access Memories on the songs “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky”. In 2024, the song appeared on the LEGO animated biography of Williams’ life and on the soundtrack album Piece by Piece.
President Donald Trump drew attention during a White House meeting with US oil executives on Friday after revealing a new lapel pin on his suit, which he described as a “Happy Trump” pin. Additionally, the ghast harness allows players to give a ride to three additional players, making it one of the best methods of transport for multiplayer maps and Realms. Now, it can be navigated and used as a seamless method of transportation that allows players to reach greater heights and difficult places with ease. Officially called the harness, it allows players to bind the mob, allowing up to four players to ride together and explore the world. These guidelines are more than fair, so I hope you got all your Happy New Year’s messages to everyone because it’s now time to pull on the reins.
After returning from the recording sessions in Paris, he attended a meeting with record label managers who said that the results were “spectacular” and that “Get Lucky” would be Daft Punk’s next single. “Happy” was the most successful song of 2014, with 13.9 million units (sales plus equivalent streams) worldwide. A live rendition of the song won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards. The song has been highly successful, peaking at No. 1 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and 19 other countries. “Happy” is an uptempo soul and neo soul song on which Williams’s falsetto voice has been compared to Curtis Mayfield’s by critics.
Reggie Ugwu of Billboard called the song “Contagiously peppy and brilliantly simple”. Jody Rosen viewed the song as a “standout” with a “sprightly neosoul funk groove”. “Happy” plays for 3 minutes and 53 seconds in common time and at a tempo of 160 beats per minute. The song was later mixed by Leslie Brathwaite at Music Box Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. On December 17, 2013, it was announced that Williams had signed to Columbia Records and would release his second studio album in 2014. They also made Williams an offer to record his own album, to which he agreed quickly, “overwhelmed that someone wanted to know what’s in my heart”.