Oxford Dictionaries has named "selfie" - which had its humble beginnings in a post on ABC Online more than a decade ago - as its word of the year.

Usage of the word has increased 17,000 per cent over the past 12 months, said the publisher of the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is styled as the definitive record of the English language.

The word beat other 2013 buzzwords such as "twerk", "bitcoin" and "showrooming".

The OxfordWord blog says the word had its first outing in 2002 in an ABC Online forum posting.

"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," said the September 13 post.

"I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."

World's first 'selfie' This photo of a busted lip is the world's first known 'selfie', posted to an ABC Online forum more than a decade ago. A user dubbed 'Hopey' posted a link to the image in the 2002 forum post. The link is now dead - but the ABC was able to recover the photo via the wonders of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Selfie was in use as early as 2003 and in common usage by 2012. It has evolved from social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph.

Selfie beat twerk - the sexually provocative dance move popularised by singer Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards in August.

Judy Pearsall, editorial director for Oxford Dictionaries, says the word of the year need not have been coined in the past 12 months and did not have to be a word that would endure.

"It is very difficult to predict accurately which new words will have staying power," she said.

"Only time will tell if these words have lasting significance."

Selfie has spawned a raft of spinoffs, including "helfie" for a picture taken of someone's own hair, "belfie" for taking a picture of your own bottom and "drelfie" for a self portrait in a drunken state.

The word's usage was based on statistical analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, a structured set of texts stored electronically.

The New Monitor Corpus collects about 150 million words in use each month, using automated criteria to scan new web content in English worldwide.

The Corpus tracks and verifies new and emerging words and senses on a daily basis.

The dictionary has a dedicated team of editors who add new words to the Oxford English Dictionary and OxfordDictionaries.com using the data.