14 DAY TRIAL // The word “selfie” is now officially part of the Oxford Dictionaries and has been declared the word of the year 2013, after its spike in popularity and incredible use in the social media.
“Selfie” stands for a self-portrait (picture) done with an electronic device, usually a smartphone or a webcam and uploaded to a social media site. The word's popularity has grown insanely during 2013, almost by 17,000 percent, and determined its selection as word of the year on Tuesday.
The word was selected after it “gained momentum throughout the English-speaking world in 2013 as it evolved from a social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph,” according to Oxford Dictionaries.
The term was first used in Australia in 2002, when a poster wrote it on a forum as a description to a photo he took of himself after a drunken fall. Two years later, the hashtag #selfie started appearing on Flickr leading to a worldwide use. The word became so popular that it beat terms like “twerk” and “bitcoin,” not even Miley Cyrus' twerking managed to overpass “selfie’s” popularity.
From the word “selfie,” a lot of similar terms appeared, including “helfie” that stands for a picture of someone's hair, “belfie” which mean taking a picture of your own posterior, or even “drelfie” that means a self-portrait while drunk, according to Reuters.
Oxford Dictionaries choose their words based on statistical analysis, after collecting around 150 million words each month. Based on multiple criteria, they scan the web to see the use of English language worldwide and then look for new emerging words.
This year's word was the same for both the US and the UK, but 2012's word of the year was split between the US whose winner was “GIF” and the UK who had the word “omnishambles.” These kind of new words introduced in the English language dictionaries show the amount of influence that technology has on the dynamic of languages and how it affects our daily activities.