Selfie, the act of taking a photo of yourself, typically on a smartphone, has been named by Oxford Dictionaries as the Word of the Year.
A huge 17,000% increase in the use of the word since last year helped selfie beat other front runners including twerk, popularised by pop star Miley Cyrus but originally used in the early 90s, binge-watch and showrooming, the practice of examining a product in a brick and mortar shop before buying it online at a lower price.
Celebrities such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber and even the Pope helped skyrocket the word into the zeitgeist; one of this year's most famous selfies features Pope Francis posing with a group of teenagers at the Vatican.
Oxford Dictionaries said the earliest known usage of the word is an Australian online forum post from 2002: "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."
A number of spin-off terms are also in circulation, such as helfie (a picture of someone's hair), belfie (a picture of someone's behind), welfie (a picture of someone working out) and drelfie (a drunken selfie).
Judy Pearsall, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, said: "Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research programme, we can see a phenomenal upward trend in the use of selfie in 2013, and this helped to cement its selection as Word of the Year.
"Social media sites helped to popularise the term, with the hashtag #selfie appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004, but usage wasn't widespread until around 2012, when selfie was being used commonly in mainstream media sources."
Oxford Dictionaries calculated the word's popularity in the English language using a research programme which collects around 150 million English words currently in use from around the web each month.
This software can be used to track the emergence of new words and monitor changes in geography, register and frequency of use.
Selfie has not yet been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, although it is being considered for future inclusion.
