Oxford Dictionaries just announced that their Word of the Year for 2013 is selfie, which means "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website."
According to Oxford research, the use of the word selfie has increased by 17,000% since this time last year. Judy Pearsall, the Editorial Director for Oxford Dictionaries, further explains their decision in a press release: “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.”
There have also been lots of plays on this word, such as welfie (workout selfie), drelfie (drunken selfie), and even, for you book lovers out there, bookshelfie (shelfie in front of your bookshelves).
Though selfie is not in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, it is being considered for future inclusion.
Other words that were shortlisted this year include bedroom tax, binge-watch, bitcoin, olinguito, shmeat, showrooming and twerk (thanks, Miley).
Oxford's word of the year last year was GIF.
What do you think about the word of the year? Should it have been something else? Let us know in the comments!