Selfie: Your 2013 Oxford English Dictionary word of the year

All kinds of people take selfies for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's a self-esteem booster. Sometimes it's to remind loved ones, "Hey! I'm alive." And sometimes, you Snapchat a selfie while wearing your cat as a neck scarf because it's Tuesday, so why not?

Now, the Oxford English Dictionary is recognizing all your hard work squinting into a front-facing camera: The venerable gatekeepers of the English language have just made the term "selfie" their 2013 word of the year. Sorry, "twerk"!

"Language research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors reveals that the frequency of the word selfie in the English language has increased by 17,000 percent since this time last year," the Oxford writes in an announcement.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Selfie joins a growing list of digital shorthand to eke out rank in the OED's pecking order. In 2012, "GIF" managed to squeeze by "YOLO." The year before that, "squeezed middle" — the term for people with average incomes, coined by our friends in the U.K. — took top honors, although "podcast" managed to crack the list of finalists.

So congrats, selfie! You deserve it. Let's all celebrate by sneaking drelfies at lunchtime.