Word.ws English Dictionary

shelfie

UK/ˈʃɛlfi/

shelfie noun: a photograph of a bookshelf/bookcase taken by its owner and shared on social media.

shelfie: a photograph of a bookshelf/bookcase taken by its owner and shared on social media
Image: Jon Dowland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

shelfie (plural shelfies)

  1. (slang, social media) A photograph of a bookshelf/bookcase taken by its owner and shared on social media.
    • Besides a feline closeup she’s placed on one shelf, and an opera mask on another, her shelfie shows a wonderful collection of books about music, including “The Rough Guide to Opera,” several biographies of Mozart and the history “Women Making Music.”2013 December 18, Hector Tobar, “Hey everybody, let's 'shelfie!'”, in Los Angeles Times
    • She's certainly observed the rate at which people are posting shelfies on Instagram.2014 April 25, Dale Hrabi, “The Rise of the 'Shelfie': Instagram's Next Craze”, in The Wall Street Journal

Examples of shelfie in a sentence

  • Some practitioners have tried to position the shelfie as "the intellectual's selfie," making it seem like some digital form of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting.2014 May 31, “Sharing your shelfie”, in Winnipeg Free Press:
  • From social media “shelfies” to Zoom backgrounds, to hyperinflated coffee-table tomes, books are everywhere nowadays, even—perhaps even especially—in the homes of people who never really read.2024 February 9, Edwin Heathcote, “‘Bookshelf wealth’ is the oldest decorating trick in the book”, in Financial Times:

Forms of shelfie

pluralshelfies

Origin of shelfie

From shelf + -ie (back-formation of "selfie").

Words that rhyme with shelfie

2 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about shelfie

What does shelfie mean?
Shelfie means a photograph of a bookshelf/bookcase taken by its owner and shared on social media.
How do you use shelfie in a sentence?
Some practitioners have tried to position the shelfie as "the intellectual's selfie," making it seem like some digital form of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting.
What part of speech is shelfie?
Shelfie is a noun.
How do you pronounce shelfie?
Shelfie is pronounced /ˈʃɛlfi/ (UK).
What is the plural of shelfie?
The plural of shelfie is shelfies.

Words near shelfie in the dictionary

  1. shelfbreak
  2. shelfbreaks
  3. shelfed
  4. shelfful
  5. shelffuls
  6. shelfie
  7. shelfies
  8. shelfing
  9. shelflation
  10. shelflations
  11. shelfless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shelfie (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-shelfie.wav.

Cite this entry: “shelfie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shelfie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.