Word of the Year

The in-depth selfie: discussing selfies through an academic lens

Looking at oneself is a timeless concept. We are constantly trying to figure out how to represent ourselves in our own brains . . . confusing certainly. In honor of Oxford Dictionaries’s 2013 word of the year — “selfie” — University of Southern California professors pay homage by discussing selfies through the lens of letters, arts, and sciences. They analyse the selfie trend through the perspectives of sociology, gender studies, religion, anthropology, and more. Watch their video below and learn how profound a camera flash and puckered mouth can be.

Words of 2013 round-up

By Alice Northover
Word of the Year season in the English-speaking world has come to a close. Oxford Dictionaries kicked off the annual reflection (and often infuriation) regarding words that were particularly relevant this past year. Here’s a brief round-up of the various words singled out by dictionaries, linguists, and enthusiasts.

Seven selfies for the serious-minded

By Alice Northover
Self-portraits are as old as their medium, from stone carvings and oil paintings, to the first daguerrotypes and instant Polaroids. Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 – selfie – indicates the latest medium: a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.

Is this a selfie which I see before me

By Alice Northover
A further celebration of Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year ‘selfie’ with a variation of MacBeth’s famous ‘dagger’ monologue. I’ve bolded the new words to make it easier to scan for the changes.

Edwin Battistella’s Word of the Year Fantasy League

By Edwin Battistella

By Edwin Battistella
Oxford Dictionaries have been collecting lexicographic material and updating dictionaries for over a century now, though its Word of the Year award is still relatively recent. Only since 2004 Oxford Dictionaries have been selecting a word that captures the mood of the previous year. Thinking about the possible contenders for 2013 (twerk? fail? drone? shutdown? bitcoin?) got me to wondering about the past.

Selfies and the history of self-portrait photography

By Kandice Rawlings

Selfie – the Oxford Word of the Year for 2013 – is a neologism defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.

Language history leading to ‘selfie’

By Melissa Mohr
To celebrate selfie’s tenure as Word of the Year, here are some WOTYs from the past, which may shed some light on its development.

The year in words: 2013

By Katherine Connor Martin
Oxford’s lexicographers use the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a 2-billion-word corpus of contemporary English usage gathered since 2000, to provide accurate descriptions of how English is used around the world in real life. A corpus is simply a collection of texts that are richly tagged so that they can be analyzed using software (we use the Sketch Engine).

Edwin Battistella’s words

By Edwin Battistella

By Edwin Battistella
The annual Word of the Year selection by Oxford Dictionaries and others inspired me to an odd personal challenge last year. In November of 2011, about the time that Oxford Dictionaries were settling on squeezed middle as both the UK and US word of the year, I made a New Year’s Resolution for 2012.

Scholarly reflections on the ‘selfie’

When Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘selfie’ as their Word of the Year for 2013, we invited several scholars from different fields to share their thoughts on this emerging phenomenon.

Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013: ‘selfie’

It’s that time of the year again. With a fanfare and a drum roll, it’s time to announce the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. The votes have been counted and verified, and I can exclusively reveal that the winner is…. ‘Selfie’

Words of 2012 round-up

By Alice Northover
While most people are getting excited for the start of awards season on Sunday with the Golden Globes, the season has just ended for word nerds. From November through January, the Word(s) of the Year announcements are made. I’ll let you decide who is the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, SAGs, National Film Critics Circle, etc. of the lexicography community. Just remember YOLO — because it appeared on every list.

Seven words that gained fame on TV shows

Television shows have a huge influence on popular culture, and so it is not surprising that many words and phrases have come into common usage through the medium of television. Here are a few of our favourite words and phrases that were popularized through iconic TV shows.

Five GIFers for the serious-minded

By Alice Northover
When people think of GIFs, they often imagine a silly animation for a quick joke. But like any medium, it has potential beyond our cat-centric imagination. “The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace,” Head of US Dictionaries, Katherine Martin, recently commented. So it’s only appropriate to highlight a few GIFers who take the file format beyond a basic form.

Media reaction to ‘GIF’ as Word of the Year [GIFed]

By Alice Northover
Reaction has been mixed from people around the United States and the world to the USA Word of the Year, so I thought I’d bring together a few highlights. Don’t forget the GIF WOTY confusables!

Six WOTY confusables about GIF

There has also been some widespread confusion on a few things relating to GIF’s selection as Word of the Year [USA], so we thought it would be helpful to give a little roundup for clarification.
(1) Oxford Dictionaries USA and The New Oxford American Dictionary (and Oxford Dictionaries UK and Oxford Dictionary of English) are not the Oxford English Dictionary. OUP publishes many dictionaries and the OED is only one of them.