The winner of the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year’s competition, as just announced, is …
Obama, Cameron and Thorning-Schmidt’s ‘selfie’. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP
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.
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Oxford Dictionaries defines selfie as:
(n.) a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.
