2025’s Words of the Year, So Far

As 2025 draws to a close, the lexicographers and linguists at the world’s most used and well-known dictionaries have begun their sometimes polarizing annual ritual of trying to capture the year’s zeitgeist through a single word.

Different dictionary publishers have had different rationales—and methodologies—for picking their so-called “word of the year.” Some perform textual analyses of billions of words; others assess what people have searched for. Whatever the case, though, the chosen words have, over the years, become a cultural moment and subject of media fascination. 

Here are some of the words of 2025 so far:

Oxford Dictionary: rage bait

Following three days of voting with more than 30,000 users’ inputs and experts’ analyses, Oxford Dictionary has chosen “rage bait,” which it defines as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content,” as its word of the year.

The dictionary explained that with 2025’s news cycle filled with debates on online content regulations, concerns over people’s digital well-being, and social media-fueled social unrest, “usage” of the word “rage bait,” according to Oxford’s “language data,” has tripled in the past 12 months, hinting at “a deeper shift in how we talk about attention—both how it is given and how it is sought after.”

The word, according to the dictionary, was first used online in 2002 in a posting on the online forum Usenet to describe drivers’ reactions to other drivers flashing their lights at them when seeking to pass in an apparent deliberate attempt to provoke.

Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said the existence of “rage bait” as a word and its increased use means that humans are “increasingly aware” of manipulation tactics present online: “Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.”

The dictionary, which began crowning its word of the year 2004, picked “rage bait” from a short list that also included “aura farming,” ​which it defines as “the cultivation of an impressive, attractive or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique,” and “biohack,” a verb that means “to attempt to improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity, or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine, or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.” 

Macquarie Dictionary: AI slop

The Macquarie Dictionary, known as an arbiter of Australian English, has picked a word of the year since 2006. For 2025, a dedicated committee from the dictionary selected “AI slop,” a colloquial noun defined as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.”

“We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop—AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use,” the committee said in the dictionary’s announcement. “While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop. Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come. The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?”

Macquarie Dictionary arrived at “AI slop” as the word of the year after first narrowing down the options to 65 words, before whittling it down further to a shortlist of 15, which contained other modern colloquialisms like “ate (and left no crumbs)”—“an expression used to indicate that someone has performed or executed something perfectly”—and the TikTok-popularized alternative meaning for “Roman Empire,” which can refer to “any of various events, interests, subjects, etc., that one finds themselves frequently thinking about, especially one considered unusual.”

Cambridge Dictionary: parasocial

The Cambridge Dictionary, which has published a word of the year since 2015, looked at a sustained trend of increased searches before making its latest choice—“parasocial,” which it defines as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.”

University of Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl first coined the term in their 1956 academic article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction.” The word combines “social” with the Greek-derived prefix para-, which in this case means “similar to or parallel to, but separate from.”

Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor Colin McIntosh said that “public interest in the term increased massively this year,” based on dictionary search data as well as Google searches. Cambridge noted that dictionary searches for the word spiked on June 30, around the time when YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial.”

“It’s interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts,” McIntosh said of the word.

In its press release, the dictionary said 2025 spotlighted parasocial relationships with celebrities, including the fanfare surrounding 2023 TIME Person of the Year Taylor Swift and her August engagement to NFL-superstar boyfriend Travis Kelce, but it also highlighted how humans have increasingly turned to artificial-intelligence chatbots for friendships and even romantic relationships.

Collins Dictionary: vibe coding

Collins English Dictionary, which has announced a word of the year since 2013, embraced the tech industry in its choice of the word of 2025. It picked “vibe coding,” a slang term which it defines as “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” As a blog post further describes it: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.”

Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI and a former AI director at Tesla, coined the term. In an X post in February, Karpathy described it as a type of computer coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” In vibe coding, large language models do the heavy lifting on creating programming code. While it’s been lauded for democratizing the coding process, the method has also been criticized for bypassing foundational knowledge of code and its potential security risks.

Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said the choice “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.”

Several other technology-related terms made it to Collins’ shortlist, including “clanker”—a derogatory term with Star Wars origins used to describe robots, computers, and AI sources—and “broligarchy,” in seeming reference to the male-dominated Silicon Valley elite and their potential to wield political influence.

Dictionary.com: 67

Dictionary.com, which has announced a “word of the year” since 2010, made an unusual choice for 2025, picking a number rather than a word. The online dictionary said it selected 67 (pronounced “six-seven,” not “sixty-seven”) after analyzing troves of data including headlines, social media trends, and search engine results. It said in its October announcement that the search for 67 “experienced a dramatic rise beginning in the summer,” increasing more than six times since June.

The term appears to come from the 2024 song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by rapper Skrilla, which has since become a popular backing tune for videos on TikTok and Instagram. Some of those videos were of LaMelo Ball of the Charlotte Hornets, whose height hovers around 6 ft. 7 in., while other videos were of teenagers and children using the term.

But the “word” of the year’s exact meaning is elusive. “It’s complicated,” says Dictionary.com. “Some say it means ‘so-so,’ or ‘maybe this, maybe that,’ especially when paired with its signature hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately up and down.” It added there was a bit of teasing undertone to it: “Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question.”

“Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s impossible to define,” Dictionary.com added. “It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brainrot.”