Selfie – “a photograph that one has taken with smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” – has been named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries editors, after the frequency of its usage increased by 17.000% over the past 12 months.
Judie Pearsall, the editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, said “selfie” appeared to have been first used in 2002 on an Australian online forum, and the hastag #selfie appeared on the photo-sharing website Flickr in 2004 and in 2012 “selfie” was being used commonly in mainstream media.
To grab the prestigious title, selfie had to beat some serious competition, including “bitcoin”, “twerk”, and “showerooming”.
“Selfie” was added to the online version of the Oxford dictionary in August 2013.