SELFIE: OXFORD DICTIONARY WORD OF THE YEAR 2013
Last year Oxford University Press split its word of the year honors between the US and the UK, but for 2013 there's one word to rule them all — and it is "selfie." The term beat out contenders like twerk, bitcoin, and binge-watch, due largely to its remarkable uptick in usage. According to research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors, the use of selfie has increased an incredible 17,000 percent since the same time last year.
Last year Oxford University Press split its word of the year honors between the US and the UK, but for 2013 there's one word to rule them all — and it is "selfie." The term beat out contenders like twerk, bitcoin, and binge-watch, due largely to its remarkable uptick in usage. According to research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors, the use of selfie has increased an incredible 17,000 percent since the same time last year.
While the
term has certainly come into the mainstream over the past 12 months, its origins
actually go much further back. The Oxford University Press discovered the term
used in an Australian forum posting in 2002, where it was used to describe a
photo the poster took of themselves after a drunken fall. Despite earning the year's top honors,
however, selfie is oddly not included in the Oxford English Dictionary
itself. It is part of the online Oxford Dictionaries website, however, and is being
considered for future inclusion in the OED as well.
This isn't
the first time that technology's heavy influence on popular culture has resulted
in a word of the year selection. In 2005 the US word of the year was "podcast,"
while last last year's US honors went to none
other than the venerable GIF (which stands for 'graphics interchange format').
Click on this link and you will find the origins and meaning of this word, others derived from it, like belfie or drelfie, and the ranking of shortlisted words for this year.
Read more hereThe BBC also devoted some lines to this new word. Check about the convenience of selfies at funerals or find out what the Obama girls and the Pope have in common!!
Read this BBC article and don't miss the video
I'm very happy to be back on moodle!!!! I've recovered my password and now i'm IN again at the end!! :)
ReplyDeleteLike Mami Lola says: the student is happy!!
I have to say, about this post particularly, that i think that nowadays making new words related to improvements and new technologies! That's fantastic, especially for english, famous for being very... polite and traditional.