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If you have seen a news story declaring 2025’s chosen “word of the year” in recent weeks, you might be forgiven for asking yourself: what, another one?
Depending on which dictionary you turn to, the chosen term this year was either Collins’s “vibe coding”, “parasocial” from Cambridge Dictionaries or their Oxford University Press rival’s “rage bait” – with many other selections besides.
From its origins 35 years ago, when the American Dialect Society attempted to find a word capable of summing up the past 12 months, this particular Americanism crossed the Atlantic in the mid-2000s and has since established itself as the closest thing the English language has to an awards season.
“There’s dozens now,” said Jonathon Green, an author and lexicographer who specialises on the evolution of slang. “It seems to me that if you have anything to do with publishing a reference book, or certainly a dictionary of some sort, you are duty-bound to come out with one of these things.”
Other linguists suggest that the final choices are selected more to attract public attention than by any deep linguistic analysis.
Robbie Love, a sociolinguist based at Aston University, in Birmingham, says that the lexicographers behind the selections are themselves aware that it is not an “entirely objective, scientific process”, otherwise “you [would] find the same words … they all will ensure that they’re different”.
Vaclav Brezina, a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, said: “The considerations for the word of the year is fairly narrow, so it is a word that captures people’s imagination and the lexicographer’s imagination in that particular year.
“I don’t think the purpose of the word of the year is really to give scientific analysis of the English language … [it] is more to draw our attention.”
Based on data analysis conducted by the Guardian, which measured the frequency of usage for words of the year chosen by Cambridge, Collins and Oxford since 2010, much of that imagination is increasingly being forged online. More than a third of chosen words are either internet slang terms or owe their meanings to technological devices. The figure rises to two-thirds for words of the year from 2021.
Lynne Murphy, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, is not surprised. “I think that’s sort of inevitable because that’s the way that words are spreading really easily these days. So, everybody’s much more aware of new words. There’s also just the fact that we’re in a really active time of technological change.”
Yet with the fleeting nature of much online content, it is perhaps to be expected that not many previously chosen words have stood the test of time. Oxford’s choice in 2022, “goblin mode” – “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent … in a way that rejects social norms or expectations” – may ring a bell but is now rarely used. Cambridge’s 2018 pick, “nomophobia” – the fear of being without your phone – is similarly obscure. NFT or non-fungible token (Collins, 2021) and “youthquake” (Oxford, 2017) have also significantly decreased in use, by 96% and 92% respectively, according to analysis of the News on the Web corpus.
Some have fallen out of popularity for good reason. Words such as Brexit, vax and quarantine spoke to a particular time in social history whose urgency may have faded, even as its after-effects remain felt. Others, including austerity and climate emergency, have waxed and waned in tandem with political developments and changing priorities, although it is hard to imagine David Cameron’s “big society” ever making a comeback.
On the lack of longevity, Jonathan Dent, a senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, said: “Whether a word of the year survives as an active and widely recognised part of the language in the long term is really less important [than] that it has something to say about where we are now, this year.
“If a candidate for word of the year maintains the kind of usage that led to its selection, that’s a sign that speakers and writers of English have found it a useful addition to their linguistic toolkit. If it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a relevant and worthwhile choice in the year it was chosen.”
While some linguists such as Murphy can be “a little bit cynical about some of the dictionary words of the years being about attention grabbing” and consider the annual ritual as “a marketing tool”, others view the exercise with less scepticism.
Love said: “I would not in any way interpret [word of the year] as being a prediction one way or the other of how that word might be used in the future.
“I think it’s just a fun way of getting people to talk about language, and particularly if they’re choosing words fairly consistently that are probably more likely to be used by younger people in online discourse, then that is a great way of engaging younger people with these sorts of conversations about language and words.”
In summary: don’t expect a word of the year to outlast it.
“It’s marketing”, Green said. “Whether it works, I mean, that’s another side of it … [but] is it really something that the public feel ‘this sums up the year I have just lived’?”
