The Oxford Dictionary released the award for the most frequent word used in English literature for the year 2013. The word ‘Selfie’ has been named as the word of the year in 2013. This word faced fierce competition with other popular words like “bitcoin”-a digital currency that uses peer to peer technology for instant payments, “twerk”-a type of raunchy dance move performed by Miley Cyrus and “binge-watch”-watching a lot of TV.
The word was first used in 2002 when it appeared in online forum of Australia. The evolution has begun as niche social media tag into a mainstream term to be used very frequently during the last year. The research has revealed that the frequency of this word in English literature has dramatically increased in last year. Some resources report the rate of increase to be around 17000%.
Over the years, word of the year awards has been given by Oxford Dictionary to reveal the inventiveness of English speakers concerning social, political or technological impact. This trend has taken special attention since 2004 when frequency of words has been observed in various niches of literature. In 2004, it was “chav”, in 2008, “credit crunch” took the award and last year was lime-lighted by “omnishambles”.
Selfie has been defined by Oxford Dictionary as “a photograph as one has taken of oneself, typically by a mobile handset, webcam or iPad and uploaded to social media”. The increase in frequency of this word was found out during the research carried out by Oxford dictionary to collect 150 million currently used words throughout the web.
This word has gained so much attention this year aided by pictures for example the picture with one of the pope with teenagers that went viral. As we go deep into the reason of its frequent use, we come to know that this word is mostly used in media and social forums. It was announced as early as 2004 on Flickr as hashtag. But it didn’t receive much attention at that time. Now during the previous year, it clean swept all the other popular words due to its use in main social media articles.