Though Miley Cyrus may hold sway over the lives and opinions of young men and women, it’s nice to see that her power has not yet extended to the good people who edit the Oxford Dictionary.

In deciding on a word of the year, Oxford Dictionary editors need to look at how language was used during that specific time frame, and find one word that sums up our lexical topography for that year. Many tipped “twerk” to take the title, but Oxford have opted for something far more appropriate.

“Selfie”

(n.) a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website

In explaining their choice, Oxford editors noted that usage of “selfie” has gone up 17,000% since this time last year. That figure comes from their new word monitor, which scans web content and collects 150 million words each month.

Despite the word not yet appearing in the leather-bound pages of well-respected Oxford English Dictionary, it was added to the Online Oxford Dictionaries this August.

The team at Oxford traced the usage of selfie back to 2002, when an Australian described a photo she had taken of herself after falling lip-first on some steps.

If you doubt the usage of the term, and doubt its credentials as a venerable word of the year, look at this:

[Source : Time]