Have you taken a 'selfie'?

Selfie – "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website" – has been named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries editors, after the frequency of its usage increased by 17,000% over the past 12 months.

The word of the year award celebrates the inventiveness of English speakers when confronted with social, political or technological change.  To qualify, a word need not have been coined within the past 12 months, but it does need to have become prominentin that time.

The word 'selfie' can be traced back to a post on an Australian online forum in 2002: "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] 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."

It has since produced an array of spinoffs, including helfie (hairstyle self), belfie (bum selfie), welfie (workout selfie), drelfie (drunken selfie), and even bookshelfie – a snap taken for the purposes of literary self-promotion.  I have sadly not heard of these spinoffs until now, but I will be mostly definitely be introducing them into my daily speech.

Other contenders of the OED's word of the year include the following: bedroom-tax, binge-watch, bitcoin, twerk, showrooming.

Previous words of the year:
2012 Omnishambles
2011 squeezed middle
2010 big society
2009 simples
2008 credit crunch
2007 carbon footprint
2006 bovvered
2005 sudoku
2004 chav

So do you partake in the selfie?  Do you often use previous words of the year?  Can't say I have ever used 'squeezed middle'...