SELFIE

I know, some of you are reaching for the smelling salts, or getting out pen and paper to write (NOT email) the editors of this dictionary. And you probably have no idea what the damn word means anyway...so, in the interests of furthering your education, I am copying the definition:

"A picture can paint a thousand words
The decision was unanimous this year, with little if any argument. This is a little unusual. Normally there will be some good-natured debate as one person might champion their particular choice over someone else�s. But this time, everyone seemed to be in agreement almost from the start. Other words were considered, as you will see from our shortlist, but selfie was the runaway winner. It�s not a new word. For starters, it has already been included in Oxford Dictionaries Online (although not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary), and we wrote about it as part of our occasional Words on the Radar series back in June 2012. But our Word of the Year need not be a new word. However, it does need to demonstrate some kind of prominence over the preceding year or so and selfie certainly fits the bill. It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet. If it is good enough for the Obamas or The Pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year.

When it started
But what of the word itself? While it is safe to say that selfie�s star has risen over the last 12 months, it is actually much older than that. Evidence on the Oxford English Corpus shows the word selfie in use by 2003, but further research shows the earliest usage (so far anyway) as far back as 2002. Its use was, fittingly enough, in an online source � an Australian internet forum.

2002 ABC Online (forum posting) 13 Sept.
"Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."

The term�s early origins seem to lie in social media and photosharing sites like Flickr and MySpace. But usage of it didn�t become widespread until the second decade of this century and it has only entered really common use in the past year or so. Self-portraits are nothing new � people have been producing them for centuries, with the medium and publication format changing. Oil on canvas gave way to celluloid, which in turn gave way to photographic film and digital media. As the process became snappier (pun intended) so has the name. And now as smartphones have become de rigueur for most, rather than just for techies, the technology has ensured that selfies are both easier to produce and to share, not least by the inclusion of a button which means you don�t need a nearby mirror. It seems likely that this will have contributed at least in part to its increased usage. By 2012, selfie...