Selfie - taking a self-portrait using a smartphone camera or a webcam - has been named as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013. Every year the organisation chooses a word or expression that’s attracted interest during the previous 12 months.
Research by Oxford Dictionaries editors has shown that usage of the word selfie in English has increased 17,000% since 2012.
Judy Pearsall, Editorial Director for Oxford Dictionaries, said “Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research programme, which collects around 150 million words of current English in use each month, we can see a phenomenal upward trend in the use of selfie in 2013, and this helped to cement its selection as Word of the Year. Social media sites helped to popularize the term, with the tag ‘selfie’ appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004, but usage wasn’t widespread until around 2012, when selfie was being used commonly in mainstream media sources.”
The first recorded usage of ‘selfie’ was in an Australian online forum during 2002.
However, although the word has been added to OxfordDictionaries.com, this doesn’t guarantee it entry into the Oxford English Dictionary.