What a year it’s been for words, 2013 has seen a whole host of new words come out of the woodwork – some may grind your gears like YOLO, and some may just be darn right bizarre, like twerking. Well now to celebrate the word of the year, it’s about time we all take a selfie – because yes, selfie has been proclaimed as the word of the year.
It seems that phablets, emojis and the bitcoin couldn’t quite contend with selfie, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary has been used 17,000 percent more times since last year. According to the official definition a selfie is:
“a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”
The use of the word selfie may have surged this year, what with your Instagram pictures and your snapchats, but according to the Oxford University Press the word was first used on an Australian forum back in 2002 – over 11 years ago. It’s not the first time a word has crept from the internet to become word of the year, with GIF taking the crown in 2012, and in 2005 ‘podcast’ was reigning supreme.
