Selfie
nounA photograph that you take of yourself, usually with a smartphone and often shared on social media.
How to spell selfie
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce selfie
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does selfie mean?
- nounA photograph that you take of yourself, usually with a smartphone and often shared on social media.
Selfie in a sentence
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She posted a selfie from the summit of the mountain.
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He took a quick selfie outside the office to mark his first day.
Where does selfie come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Selfie is a thoroughly modern coinage built from the ordinary English word 'self', which descends from the Old English 'self' or 'seolf' meaning 'one's own person', plus the casual, affectionate suffix '-ie' that English loves to attach to informal words (as in 'movie', 'doggie', or 'foodie'). The word is widely traced to Australian internet slang of the early 2000s; one of the earliest recorded uses appeared in an Australian online forum in 2002, where a man described photographing his own injured lip. The clipped, friendly '-ie' ending captures the offhand, self-mocking tone of the act, snapping a quick picture of yourself on a phone. The term spread explosively with the rise of front-facing camera phones and social media, and Oxford Dictionaries named it word of the year in 2013. The spelling is regular and rarely causes trouble, though the chief pebble in the shoe is remembering the '-ie' rather than a stray '-y' ending.
How the word is built
- self (oneself)
- -ie (familiar/diminutive suffix)
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