Key figures: Oxford University Press editors; Katherine Martin (Head of U.S. Dictionaries, Oxford University Press)
Summary
On November 19, 2013, Oxford Dictionaries announced that “selfie” had been chosen as the Word of the Year for 2013. The term, referring to a self-taken photograph typically shared on social media, defeated seven competitors including “twerk,” “schmeat” (synthetically produced meat), and “bitcoin.” Oxford’s language research revealed a striking surge in usage: the word’s frequency in English had increased by 17,000% since the previous year, reflecting its explosive adoption across digital platforms. Though “selfie” had first appeared in an Australian online forum in September 2002, the word achieved mainstream prominence in 2012–2013, driven by the proliferation of smartphone cameras and social-media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. The decision was described as unusually unanimous by Oxford’s editorial board.
Origins and Spread of the Term
The word “selfie” entered the English language on September 13, 2002, when an Australian user posted a photograph of a split lip to an ABC Online forum with the note: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.” This citation—documented through research by Macquarie Dictionary and later confirmed by Oxford’s editors—is the earliest known written use of the term in any form.
The word remained confined to Australian internet vernacular through the mid-2000s. Its global spread accelerated sharply after two concurrent hardware and platform developments: Apple’s iPhone 4 (June 2010), which introduced a front-facing camera capable of quality self-portraiture, and Instagram’s launch in October 2010. By March 2013, the hashtag #selfie had been used over 23 million times on Instagram alone, according to a Guardian survey of the platform’s archive. Oxford Dictionaries tracked the word’s frequency in their approximately 2-billion-word corpus from its first appearance in 2004, and documented the 17,000% annual increase between 2012 and 2013 that led to the WOTY selection.
Oxford’s formal definition, added to OxfordDictionaries.com at the time of the announcement, read: “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.”
The 2013 Shortlist
Oxford Dictionaries compiles its Word of the Year through ongoing corpus analysis supplemented by citations submitted by volunteer language monitors worldwide. The eight-word 2013 shortlist encompassed the breadth of that year’s cultural preoccupations:
| Word | Definition |
|---|---|
| selfie | A self-portrait photograph taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared on social media |
| twerk | To dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements |
| schmeat | Meat grown synthetically from biological tissue in laboratory conditions |
| bitcoin | A digital currency operating independently of a central bank |
| binge-watch | To watch multiple episodes of a television programme in rapid succession |
| olinguito | A newly identified mammal species (Bassaricyon neblina) from the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador |
| bedroom tax | An informal term for the United Kingdom’s under-occupancy penalty, a 2013 welfare-benefit reduction for social-housing tenants with a spare bedroom |
| showrooming | The practice of visiting a store to examine a product before purchasing it online at a lower price |
Each shortlisted word reflected a distinct dimension of 2013 culture: streaming television habits (binge-watch), UK welfare-policy debate (bedroom tax), laboratory biology (schmeat), e-commerce behavior (showrooming), and cryptocurrency (bitcoin). Bitcoin’s presence on the shortlist was particularly notable given that its price surged from roughly $13 in January 2013 to over $1,000 by November—the same month as the WOTY announcement. See the Bitcoin price surge of 2013 for the full story of cryptocurrency’s breakout year.
The Smartphone Camera and the Democratization of Portraiture
The cultural moment that made “selfie” the defining word of 2013 was inseparable from hardware and platform trends. Apple’s iPhone 4 (June 2010) introduced the first front-facing smartphone camera capable of quality self-portraits to a mass market. By 2013, front-facing cameras were standard across Android and iOS devices. Instagram, acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for $1 billion, had 150 million registered users by September 2013 and was processing approximately 55 million photographs per day.
The self-portrait as an artistic form stretches back to the Renaissance — Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Eight (1500) is among the most iconic — but democratizing the photographic self-portrait required the convergence of cheap cameras, ubiquitous connectivity, and social platforms providing an instant audience. The selfie collapsed the distinction between artist and subject, between photographer and model, and between private self-regard and public self-presentation. By 2013, the selfie had already begun to reshape physical spaces: bathroom mirror design, event venue lighting, and consumer electronics product development all began accounting for conditions optimal for self-photography.
The wearable-camera debate unfolding simultaneously in technology culture echoed and complicated the selfie phenomenon. Google Glass, launched to its Explorer Program in April 2013 at $1,500 per unit, extended the camera to the face itself, raising immediate questions about whose perspective and whose likeness the new self-imaging culture served — and who controlled the resulting images.
Privacy, Surveillance, and the Camera Everywhere
The selfie boom of 2013 developed alongside a growing cultural reckoning with omnipresent cameras. The same smartphone cameras that democratized self-portraiture also enabled citizens to document police interactions, share eyewitness footage of news events, and surveil public figures. The Snowden NSA revelations of June 2013 heightened awareness that connected devices — including smartphones — were potential vectors for government data collection, not merely tools for personal expression.
Social media platforms’ terms of service became topics of public scrutiny as users grew more aware that the photographs they shared were retained, analyzed, and commercially exploited. The Oxford selection of “selfie” acknowledged the cultural centrality of self-generated digital imagery precisely at the moment when the legal and social frameworks governing that imagery remained contested and largely unresolved.
After 2013: The Selfie’s Cultural Trajectory
The selfie’s momentum continued to accelerate in the years following the WOTY designation. On March 2, 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres assembled a star-studded group photograph at the Academy Awards — a photo retweeted over 3.4 million times within 24 hours, temporarily crashing Twitter’s servers, and setting the record for the most shared single image in the platform’s history at that point. The moment demonstrated the selfie’s full absorption into mainstream and elite culture alike.
At its 2014 developer conference (Google I/O), Google reported that approximately 93 million selfies were being taken daily on Android devices alone. The form began influencing architecture: “selfie mirrors” appeared in museums, hotel lobbies, and airports. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery held its first “public selfie day” in 2014. Photographic historians began situating the selfie in the lineage of the daguerreotype portrait — the 19th century’s first widely accessible personal photographic technology — noting structural similarities in the democratizing impulse behind both forms.
Significance
The selection of “selfie” as Word of the Year marked a cultural milestone in 2013, signifying the broader normalization of digital self-documentation and the reshaping of identity expression in the internet age. The dramatic surge in usage — 17,000% in a single year — quantified a qualitative shift in how people conceived of photography, ownership, and personal narrative: the smartphone camera had democratized portraiture, and social media had made self-presentation both instantaneous and globally distributable. The choice also reflected language’s responsiveness to technology; Oxford’s decision to elevate a word originating in internet culture acknowledged that digital communication had become central to how people construct and share meaning.
The victory of “selfie” over “bitcoin” on the WOTY shortlist suggested that in 2013, the cultural impact of personal digital expression and social connection — however ephemeral the medium — outweighed even the most dramatic financial technology story of the decade. Both phenomena, however, shared a common root: the smartphone had become the defining personal device of the era, simultaneously enabling the informal self-portrait and the peer-to-peer digital transaction.
Sources
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[Oxford word of the year for 2013: Selfie CNN](https://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/19/living/selfie-word-of-the-year) -
[‘Selfie’ Wins 2013 “Word Of The Year” Fox News](https://radio.foxnews.com/2013/11/19/selfie-wins-2013-word-of-the-year-photos) - Selfie — Oxford Reference
- Instagram — Wikipedia
- Ellen DeGeneres Oscar selfie — Wikipedia
- Selfie — Wikipedia