Selfie selected as 2013 word of the year - The Age

Meet the man who coined the term that is on everyone's lips. The man whose own burst lip triggered a burst of verbal creativity that has made the word ''selfie'' the Oxford Dictionary word of the year.

The man, known only by his online pseudonym ''Hopey'', is the first person to have used the word ''selfie'', which he used to describe a self-portrait of his swollen lips that he posted on an ABC technology forum.

In September 2002, a drunken Hopey, then a third-year maths and computer science student at the University of New England in NSW, had tripped and split open his lip at a friend's 21st party and needed three stitches.

The stitches would have been gone in a week but he had, in his own words, ''been licking the wound a bit 'cause it gets really dry and uncomfortable'', and asked the forum whether this would ''make the stitches dissolve too soon''.

He asked his fellow forum members whether they wanted to see a picture and after encouragement from fellow forum member ''My Evil Twin, Beryl'', he posted the first known-selfie at 3.05pm on September 13, 2002.

Several minutes later he coined the term itself:

''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,'' he wrote.

A selfie, as it is now defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is ''a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website''.

Hopey's other posts on the forum include musings on calculus, what causes curly hair and spontaneous combustion.

The next recorded usage is also from Australia with the term appearing on a personal blog in 2003.

''It seems likely that it may have originated in the Australian context,'' dictionary editor Katherine Martin said.

''The earliest evidence that we know of at the moment is Australian and it fits in with a tendency in Australian English to make cute, slangy words with that 'ie' ending.''

There's barbie for barbecue, firie for firefighter and tinnie for a can of beer.

Selfie was selected as the 2013 word of the year from a shortlist that included binge-watch (to watch multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession), showrooming (visiting a shop to examine a product before buying it online) and twerk (to dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner).

With AAP