Word of the Year

by Saafia Masoom

  The company Global Language Monitor (GLM) says that every 98 minutes a new word is created. And somewhere along the way we got Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year for 2013: “selfie.” Though the term was coined in 2002 on an Australian online forum, it only began to see a rise in usage over the past year. Who knew people were using this kind of terminology in those days?

  Oxford offers the alternative spelling “selfy” for the more common usage of “selfie.” While the actual entry defines it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” we’ve observed the word being slipped into context rather casually to suggest that it is merely just a picture taken of oneself. It all seems pretty selfie-explanatory.

  Think back over the past twelve months to how many times you’ve typed the word “selfie” into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. If you answered with “0” then clearly you didn’t contribute much to the 17,000% surge in frequency that Oxford editors reported seeing since last year.

  As alluded to before, the Word of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to be new; it just has to demonstrate notability or frequent usage. The choices are selected based on their representation of the particular year’s characteristic mood, philosophy, or cultural mindset. Thus, it’s probably not a surprise that the U.K.-centered Oxford Dictionaries offices and the U.S.-based teams have chosen different words over the past few years. A special research program called Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus scans web data each month to obtain about 150 million words in use from the English language. It provides statistics based on what’s being used where, how often, and identifies new words. Ultimately, a panel of editorial, publicity, marketing staff members, lexicographers (people who write the dictionary), and other consultants pick the winning word from those that appear on the New Monitor Corpus radar often.  

  This year’s candidates ranged from “bitcoin” to the obvious “twerk.” In the end, it was decided that “selfie” would triumph all by being rewarded with the online dictionary entry. But, let’s face the facts. It’s a well-deserved honor since nearly everyone, including Justin Bieber and Hillary Clinton, has hopped on the selfie train. And that, combined with this recognition, makes “selfie” one pretty special word.