Oxford Dictionaries announced "Selfie" as the international Word of the Year 2013, noting its frequency in the English language has increased by 17,000% since last year.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word "selfie" first appeared in 2002, when it was used in an Australian online forum. It was popularized by social media during the years (it was used as a hashtag on Flickr in 2004), but it became widely adopted around 2012, when it started commonly being used in mainstream media.
See also: 10 Greatest Selfie Photobombs of All Time
To confirm this, we've browsed through the Mashable archive, and found several instances of the word in articles from 2012.
To grab the prestigious title, selfie had to beat some serious competition, including "bitcoin," "twerk," and "showrooming".
Oxford Dictionaries has been awarding this title to words that attracted a lot of interest during a particular year since 2004. Previous words of the year include "omnishambles" (2012), "squeezed middle" (2011), "refudiate" (2010) and "unfriend" (2009).
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Image: Flickr, Brian McGuirk