In a Word: Word of the Year Round-up

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today. 

It has become an annual tradition at year’s end for the makers of the world’s English dictionaries to take a look back at the previous year’s language use and choose one Word of the Year (WotY). Exactly what elevates a word to WotY status — common use, overuse, top slang — varies from dictionary to dictionary, as does how the word was chosen. 

As in recent years, the Words of the Year for 2025 tend to focus on life in the Digital Age. Here is a round-up of the top dictionaries’ choices and how they arrived at the “winning” word: 

Merriam-Webster Dictionaries: slop 

slop (n): digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence 

Merriam-Webster is the gold standard American dictionary, tracing its lexicological heritage back to Noah Webster’s dictionary. M-W takes a data-driven approach to choosing its WotY, analyzing lookup data from its online dictionary to see what words people are most curious about. WotY candidates aren’t simply the most-looked-up words (love is usually up there), but the ones that have seen the greatest increase in lookups compared to previous years. 

M-W considered seven other candidates for its WotY:  

• conclave (n): “a meeting of Roman Catholic cardinals secluded continuously while choosing a pope” 

• gerrymander (v): “to divide or arrange (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage” 

• performative (adj): “made or done for show (as to bolster one’s own image or make a positive impression on others)” 

• six seven (interj): a nonsensical expression, which has no specific, permanent meaning 

• tariff (n): “a schedule of duties imposed by a government on imported or in some countries exported goods” 

• touch grass (v): “to participate in normal activities in the real world especially as opposed to online experiences and interactions” 

• Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (proper n): Thanks to the Roblox game, this lake on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts has seen a spike in lookups this year. M-W’s lexicographers note that they are rather impartial to the place’s more common name: Webster Lake. 

Slop, though, won out, and for good reason: There’s just so much of it out there. (And for the record, none of the words written in this or any other In a Word column were written by artificial intelligence.) 

Oxford University Press: rage bait 

rage bait (n): 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 account. 

The keepers of England’s historical Oxford English Dictionary, as well as their more useful reference dictionaries, pulled together a group of language experts, who created a shortlist of three WotY candidates, which were then voted on by Instagram users. In three days, more than 30,000 votes were cast, and rage bait came out on top. 

Oxford’s two runners-up were 

• aura farming (n): “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”  

• biohack (v): “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” 

Cambridge Dictionary: parasocial 

Parasocial (adj): 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 

Like at Merriam-Webster, the folks at Cambridge (another British dictionary) choose a WotY by poring over online search data and pulling out the words people have shown great interest in. Parasocial originally comes from the world of psychology but has been popping up more and more in online interactions. Without knowing the word, many people have had parasocial experiences over the last year, including the parasocial joy at the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, or the parasocial grief for the loss of Jane Goodall or Malcolm Jamal-Warner. 

Other contenders for the Cambridge WotY were 

• memeify (v): “to turn something into a meme” 

• pseudonymization (n): “a process in which information that relates to a particular person, for example, a name or email address, is changed to a number or name that has no meaning so that it is impossible to see who the information relates to”  

• slop (n): “content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence,” and also Merriam-Webster’s WotY 

Collins Dictionary: vibe coding 

vibe coding (n): the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code 

An internal team of logophiles and lexicographers at Collins Dictionary — which creates dictionaries in quite a few languages — chose this WotY. Though the criteria for consideration aren’t clear, the newness of a word seems to be one quality under consideration, which is evident from the (rather long) shortlist they were working from:  

• aura farming (n): “the deliberate cultivation of a distinctive and charismatic persona” 

• biohacking (n): “the activity of altering the natural processes of one’s body in an attempt to improve one’s health and longevity” 

• broligarchy (n, usually derogatory): “a small clique of very wealthy men who exert political influence” 

• clanker (n): “a derogatory term for a computer, robot, or source of artificial intelligence.” The word comes straight from Star Wars, and one commenter has referred to it as “the N-word for robots.” 

• coolcation (n): “a holiday in a place with a cool climate” — which is becoming more common as world temperatures rise 

• glaze (v): “to praise or flatter excessively, often undeservedly” 

• The acronym HENRY: “high-earner, not rich yet” 

• micro-retirement (n): “a break taken between periods of employment in order to pursue personal interests,” though some argue that this is just a fancy-schmancy word for “a day off work” 

• taskmasking (n): “the act of giving a false impression that one is being productive in the workplace”  

But coming out on top was vibe coding, which, to its detractors, is the coding equivalent of A.I. “art” — tell a generative A.I. system what you want, and the A.I. will create it for you.  

Macquarie Dictionary: A.I. slop 

A.I. slop (n): low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user 

Down in Australia, the Macquarie Dictionary is the dictionary of choice. Each year a select committee convenes to create a shortlist for the WotY. Not only does the committee itself select the Committee’s Choice Word of the Year, but the public at large votes as well on the People’s Choice Word of the Year. This year, the groups agreed on A.I. slop, which bears a more focused definition than Merriam-Webster’s for slop.  

Macquarie’s shortlist wasn’t all that short; it included 

• attention economy (n): “an economy in which human attention is treated as a major commodity, especially in advertising, in which the aim is to maximize the time a customer spends viewing a product” 

• BAL rating (n): “system of assessing a building’s potential exposure to ember attack, radiant heat, and direct flame of a bushfire; the rating serving to determine the construction requirements for the structure” — BAL stands for “bushfire attack level” 

• bathroom camping (n): “the act of isolating oneself in a bathroom or bathroom cubicle for a period of time, as to seek solitude, avoid work, regulate emotions after overstimulation, anxiety or stress, etc.” 

• femgore (n): “a subgenre of horror in which female protagonists are given agency over the narrative, and while still victimized, objectified, or exploited to an extent, are not passive; often becoming the characters who commit the acts of violence, especially in retaliation or retribution to the stereotypical system they are fighting against” 

• medical misogyny (n): “entrenched prejudice against females in the context of medical treatment and knowledge, especially in the area of reproductive health, as by medical professionals minimizing or dismissing reports of symptoms, lack of research into gynecological conditions, etc.” 

• Roman Empire (n): “any of various events, interests, subjects, etc., that one finds themselves frequently thinking about, especially one considered unusual.” This comes from a TikTok trend in which men were asked how often they thought about the Roman Empire. 

Dictionary.com: 67 

67 (interj): a viral, ambiguous slang term that is largely nonsensical, though some argue it means “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” especially when paired with a hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately up and down 

If you’ve looked at what dictionaries have said about this word, you’ll note two things: 1) it’s a thing kids say that doesn’t seem to have a definite meaning; and 2) exactly how it should be represented in text is still up for question. It can be 67, 6 7, 6-7, six seven, or six-seven. All we know for certain is that it is definitely not “sixty-seven.” This writer hopes that the fad word disappears from common use quickly enough that a standardized spelling will be purely academic. 

The word comes from a Skrilla song called “Doot Doot (6 7),” and it represents one of the first slang words to be adopted and widely spread by Generation Alpha — those born between roughly 2010 and 2020.  

To choose its WotY, Dictionary.com’s experts “analyzed a large amount of data including newsworthy headlines, trends on social media, search engine results, and more to identify words that made an impact on our conversations, online and in the real world.” Here are some of the other words they considered: 

• agentic (adj): “(of artificial intelligence) capable of acting independently to accomplish a goal or task; acting like a human agent”  

• Gen Z stare (n): “a vacant look that [those in Gen Z] are said to give people when it seems like a response is warranted” 

• overtourism (n): “a situation in which too many tourists travel to a popular destination, causing the place to suffer negative environmental, economic, and sociocultural impacts” 

• tradwife (a shortening of traditional wife) (n): “a married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional femininity and female gender roles, often associated with conservative or alt-right political values”