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2025 Word of the Year… of the Year!
By Harry Lambert, Account Executive
The start of a new year is a time to reflect on the year just gone – as any article with a clichéd introduction will tell you. These reflections can take many forms: a month-by-month timeline, a glittering graphically designed ‘Wrapped’ montage, or the contrivance of a New Year’s resolution that will last until exactly January 10th. But for my part, the best summation of yearly reflection is the appearance of end of year lists.
These directories are often defined by quantity: 50 Most Shocking Celebrity Moments, or Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums. One annual tradition stands apart. Each year, various dictionaries unveil a ‘Word of the Year’, attempting to capture the year’s vicissitudes in a single word or phrase.
There is certainly the risk of assigning ‘Word of the Year’ to an ill-judged phrase descended into irrelevance (w00t, Merriam Webster, 2007), or the selection itself may be too much, leading to a 38-page report in place of a sole word, but these selections can serve as a successful record. The Oxford Dictionary previously compiled ‘A Word a Year’ list, opting for a neologism from each year of the previous century, depicting both flashbulb events literally: ‘9/11’ in 2001, ‘Watergate’ in 1972, but also trends growing and dying: ‘Hippy’ in 1953, and ‘cruise missile’ 6 years later.
So what do 2025’s ‘Words of the Year’ say about culture and language over the past year?
Cambridge Dictionary – ‘parasocial’
Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager, explained the Dictionary’s word of the year pick is based on the inscrutable tricolon of ‘user data, zeitgeist and language’, with ‘parasocial’ transitioning from an academic term to one used daily in social media posts, while also seeing significantly increased interest in searches and public fascination with celebrities.
Parasocial relationships drawn from mass media are nothing new. The reason ‘parasocial’ has gained such significance for this year in particular however, is as a descriptor for many people’s interaction with AI chatbots.
In both cases, ‘parasocial’ has come to represent the changing way in which we interact with content. The repeated exposure that social media and AI models provides creates greater opportunity for identification, and this is the foundation of the parasocial.
Parasocial interactions are at the extreme end of the spectrum, but it reflects something inherently true about content that makes the greatest impact. Specifically, finding something that resonates and connects with an audience or reader is always likely to have the greatest effect.
Collins Dictionary – ‘vibe coding’
‘Vibe coding’, the software practice turning plain language into computer code using artificial intelligence, is selected as ‘a term that captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology’.
2025 saw a rise in use of AI for everyday queries, and while the resulting output from ‘vibe coding’ will still only be most accurate with the most precise instruction, it represents an interesting adjunct between language and technology.
It’s far from a perfect science, but a user can in theory offer a rough estimation of what they would like, and the technology will fill in the gaps. This moves away from the primacy of precise language, allowing people to communicate in vibes, opening up access to those not previously tech-fluent.
Merriam Webster and The Economist – ‘slop’
Both the pre-eminent American dictionary and a leading UK print magazine opted for ‘slop’ as word of the year. Detailed in the announcement as selected by ‘Merriam-Webster’s human editors’, the term is defined as digital content of low quality that is produced in quantity by AI, and reflects the considerable proliferation of mass-produced AI text and videos populating media in 2025.
There may be a more positive consequence to the emergence of ‘slop’ however. Its mass appearance necessitates a more judicious consumer, recognising ‘slop’ and therefore accurately casting it aside as far less worthy of attention.
In an unprecedented era of crowded media, high quality content that stands out has never been so important, especially in these febrile times.
Oxford – ‘rage bait’
The Oxford Dictionary chose based on the trio of ‘votes’, ‘the sentiment of public commentary’, and ‘analysis of lexical data’.
Meaning content deliberately designed to cause anger or outrage to increase engagement, it must be said that the selection of ‘rage bait’ reflects something innately understood: negative headlines and content elicit greater attention.
But ‘rage bait’ as a tactic goes further. The Dictionary announcement deemed that the term ‘has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention’. That last word, ‘attention’, is crucial, and it’s not baiting for concern or angst – it’s rage. Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, said of the announcement, ‘the internet was focused on… sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions’.
It’s a deflating realisation, but I’d be sceptical that this ‘dramatic shift’ is here to stay. In the same way that a proliferation of ‘slop’ content necessitates a more critical observer, the more ‘rage bait’ becomes component of content, the more it loses its impact. It does not feel like any great stretch that provocative content will ultimately reach saturation. An inured audience is more likely to be grabbed by content with greater depth, and good news stories still have their place.
Standing the test of time
Certainly the inextricable connection of technology to modern language is clearly visible in the collage of these words, and it is often raised in the accompanying announcements. But I question whether most of these terms will be viewed as much more than ephemera, given social media ubiquity is often mistaken for cultural imprint. I’ve deliberately neglected discussion of the Dictionary.com selection, ‘6-7’, for this very reason.
The ‘Words of the Year’ that do stick around are often those reflecting a political moment, and glancing at previous words of the year, it is ‘austerity’, ‘carbon footprint’ or ‘credit crunch’ that are more of a madeleine to a distinct era. Words from 2020 are immediate totems for example – ‘lockdown’ or ‘quarantine’ are obvious, though I would argue in this case that naming 2020 in of itself achieves the same aim, in the same way that 2001 or 1969 would.
Is ‘slop’, ‘vibe coding’, ‘rage bait’ likely to do this? Perhaps, but I remain sceptical. Language can move quickly, and neologisms, especially in the digital era, can suddenly rise to common parlance. But language also moves slowly, and it’s no surprise that many lexical inventions are washed away in the glacial passage of time.
