‘Tis the season for…the year in review including year-end lists.
At this point in the calendar, certain prestigious, or perceived prestigious, dictionaries traditionally announce which words rose to the top of the online search hierarchy and/or achieved prominence through an assessment of other or additional metrics.
According to Time magazine, “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.”
Many of the crowned words each year typically have contained political overtones or are supposedly so trendy in the culture that you may have never even heard of them let alone used them.
In that context, some of the words that spiked in search can show up in more than one list.
The distinction between words in the conventional sense and slang has also become blurry.
Given that the words are heavily social media focused, moreover, these lists to some degree seem like clickbait, the latter which was probably a word of the year somewhere along the line.
With that in mind, the slang term try hard may come to mind with these winner announcements.
In any event, and purportedly or largely based on analytics, here is the compilation for the words that people looked up the most.
Note that sometimes a word of the year, or a runner-up, consists of more than one word — or as of this year, a number.
Judge for yourself whether the winning words are worthy enough to actually be added to a dictionary.
Cambridge Dictionary
For U.K.-based Cambridge, parasocial its word of the year.
The dictionary defines the term 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.”
Here is a portion of the Cambridge explanation:
“As social media intensifies the intimacy that fans feel with their adored celebrities, and with the rise in popularity of AI companions that can take on personalities, the word for these one-way relationships – parasocial – is having its own moment.
“Lookups of parasocial on the Cambridge Dictionary spiked on June 30, 2025, when the YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his ‘number 1 parasocial.’”
Just two words, pseudonymization and memify, made the Oxford shortlist.
Collins Dictionary
Vibe coding (“an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using AI”) is Collins’ word of the year, according to this elucidation on the Collins blog:
“…a term that captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology. Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding refers to the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code. Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It’s programming by vibes, not variables. While tech experts debate whether it’s revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life…”
Collins offered a rather long shortlist which included words such as aura farming, biohacking, broligarchy, glaze, and micro-retirement.
Dictionary.com
In a decision that got a lot of play in the media, Dictionary.com chose 67 (six-seven) as its word of the year, but it admitted it was struggling to define it.
What does 67 mean? Well…it’s complicated. 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. 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…”
Shortlisted words included agentic, aura farming, broligarchy (the latter two which showed up on Collins’ list), Gen Z stare, kiss cam, tariff, and tradwife.
“To select the 2025 Word of the Year, our lexicographers 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,” Dictionary.com asserted.
A song by rapper Skrilla reportedly originated 67.
Merriam-Webster
For the Merriam-Webster dictionary editors in 2025, slop is the word of the year.
“We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,’” the editors asserted.
“In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats, slop set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking,” the dictionary claimed.
Other words that Merriam-Webster editors said stood out in lookup data his year were conclave, gerrymander, performative, six-seven (see above), tariff, and touch grass.
The combined AI slop (rather than just slop by itself) is a term that has gone into common usage this year.
Oxford Dictionary
U.K.-based Oxford University Press shortlisted three contenders for its word of the year and then put it to a vote:
“After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, or experts chose rage bait after considering votes, the sentiment of public commentary, and their analysis of lexical data.”
Oxford defines rage bait 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.”
The runners-up were aura farming and biohack.
For clarification, Oxford explained that its word of the year “can be a singular word or expression, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit of meaning.”
Parenthetically, Oxford selected brain rot as its 2024 word of the year, which could be a contender for word of the decade or longer.
Note: The American Dialect Society selects its word of the year at its annual meeting in early January.
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