CityNews – ‘Selfie’ has beaten tough competition from words like ‘binge-watch’, ‘showrooming’ and ‘twerk’ to become Oxford Dictionary’s Word of 2013.
Doing it wrong.
A selfie, for those who have just come out of a lengthy coma, is a self-portrait photograph, often taken on a camera phone and posted onto social networking sites. Research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries revealed that over the last 12 months use of the word selfie increased 17,000 per cent.
“Social media sites helped to popularise the term, with the hashtag 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,” said editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, Judy Pearsall.
Although selfie has not yet made it into that final arbiter the Oxford English Dictionary, it is currently being considered for inclusion.