Oxford Dictionary's 2013 Word of the Year is "Selfie."
Selfie is defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website." Millions around the world perpetuating a tradition started over a decade ago, Oxford wrote.
According to The Huffington Post, the publisher of the Oxford dictionaries said Tuesday that "selfie" saw a huge jump in usage in the past year. The use of the word selfie has increased by 17,000 percent since this time last year.
"Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research program, 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," Judy Pearsall, the Editorial Director for Oxford Dictionaries said in a press release.
Pearsall said "selfie" reportedly first appeared to be used in 2002 on an Australian online forum. The hash tag, #selfie, then began appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr in 2004.
The words were chosen by a research program that monitors online content and collects around 150 million words of English in use each month, the Associated Press reported.
Other words that were short listed this year include "Bitcoin," the digital currency that gained widespread media attention; "showrooming," the practice of visiting a shop to look at a product before buying it online at a lower price; "schmeat," synthetically produced meat; "twerk," the sexually provocative dance move.
According to CNN, Oxford may not much care how you spell it. Individuals can spell it with "ie" or "y," as in "selfy."
The word has already been very productive, pumping out offspring. It has given birth to "helfie", a photo of one's own hair, "belfie", a snapshot of one's own backside, and "welfie", a selfie taken while working out, aka the most annoying kind.
Researchers behind the renowned dictionaries pick a prominent word or expression in the English language each year that best reflects the mood of the times. Previous words of the year have included "unfriend" in 2009, "credit crunch" in 2008, "carbon footprint" in 2007 and "Sudoku" in 2005. Oxford's word of the year last year was GIF.
"Selfie" was added to the online version of the Oxford dictionary in August and is being considered for future inclusion in the more traditional Oxford English Dictionar, the AP reported.
