‘Selfie’ gets
an honour all to itself

Editors from Oxford Dictionaries, which made it their Word of 2013, said it the word has evolved from a niche social media tag into a mainstream term for a self-portrait photograph.

One of the most famous selfies this year was the Pope posing with teenagers at the Vatican, which went viral on social media.

An eyebrow-raising selfie was taken by Samantha Cameron’s sister on the morning of her wedding day, revealing David Cameron napping on a four-poster bed in the background.

And selfies hit the headlines this week when a woman from Plymouth claimed that a burglar had broken into her flat and taken a selfie on her phone. She subsequently realised she had invited this man in for coffee.

Oxford said the earliest known usage is an Australian online forum post from 2002: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic]... And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

A number of spin-off terms are also in circulation, such as helfie (a picture of someone’s hair), belfie (a picture of someone’s behind), welfie (a picture of someone working out) and drelfie (a drunken selfie).

The frequency of the word selfie in the English language has increased by 17,000 per cent since this time last year, according to the editors. It has not yet been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, but is being considered.

The shortlist for Word of the Year included binge-watch (to watch multiple episodes of a television programme in rapid succession), showrooming (the practice of examining a product at a shop before buying it online at a lower price) and twerk (dancing in a sexually provocative manner).