Official Birthday of the term "Selfie"

When the Oxford dictionary decided to make "Selfie" the Word of the Year 2013, this sparked a lot of research into the origin of the word and it seems like the most likely birthplace of the term has been decided to be from 'Down-Under" also know as Australia!

The Aussies historically have been notorious for their distinct accents and also their tendency to shorten longer words with and '-ie'. Examples of such words would the 'barb-ie', short for 'barbecue'. This has been cited as evidence that the term 'self-ie' had been coined by the Australians and there is more convincing evidence to show for it.

On September 13th, 2002 at 3:19pm, an Australian, Nathan Hope, posted a photo of his injured lip in an online forum and called it a selfie. The actual words he used were: "I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.". Here is the photo below and also a screenshot of the forum post:

With such a case presented by the Aussies, I think the world will have to give them this one.

As to why the selfie did not take off immediately with its birth into the digital world in 2002, this might be attributed to the underveloped digital infrastructure for photo sharing at that time period. Although forums did allow photos to be shared, the number of forum participants at the time were small and divided among many different forums. This is unlike Instagram where the selfie really thrived due to there only being one Instagram photo database. The selfie was able to latch on to this to have a greater global reach in 2010 onwards.

(Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3061118/Australia-revealed-invented-word-selfie-2000-Aussie-phrases-words-added-Oxford-Dictionaries.html#ixzz3qnCrZ1FB Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook)