The selfie craze reached a new milestone Monday evening when Oxford Dictionaries announced that the Internet-born noun was its international Word of the Year.
The word selfie, “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” beat out other internet words like ‘twerk’, ‘Bitcoin’, and ‘binge-watch’ to earn its 2013 title.
Once an obscure word, the selfie craze has become widely popular in the English language with a 17,000 percent use increase over the past year, according to Oxford Dictionaries editors. “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, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, said in a statement.
First Lady Michelle Obama shared one with Bo and Hillary Clinton even snapped one with Meryl Streep. So we should all stop and smile for the camera to capture that perfect moment.
Abby Borovitz