Oxford Dictionaries names selfie word of the year The selfie is ready for its close-up. On Monday evening, Oxford Dictionaries announced that the Internet-born noun is its international Word of the Year, beating out other of-the-moment verbs like binge-watch and twerk. For the uninitiated few, selfie officially means a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website. Once an obscure word used on sites like Flickr, the selfie has since become a widely-used term: Its frequency in the English language increased by a whopping 17,000 percent over the past 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,” Oxford Dictionaries Editorial Director Judy Pearsall said in a press release.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 15:32:30 +0000