At one time I probably would have tried to argue that "selfie" isn't a "real" word. And yet it's a sequence of letters (or phonemes) that conveys a meaning amo

At one time I probably would have tried to argue that "selfie" isn't a "real" word. And yet it's a sequence of letters (or phonemes) that conveys a meaning among a large number of English speakers, so in what sense isn't it a word? Because it wasn't a word last year? Dictionaries are inevitably descriptivist, they just have to decide what their thresholds are, in terms of time and numbers.