More Words of the Year 2025

 

While my previous blog post was about the Cambridge word of the year for 2025, this post will reflect on words of the year from three other sources: Oxford, Collins and Merriam-Webster. Not surprisingly, all three dictionaries chose words related to online activities.

Oxford University Press announced that “rage bait” was its top choice for the year, an expression referring to online content intended to provoke anger by being irritating or sounding taboo, for the purpose of increasing hits or enhancing interaction on specific sites or social media accounts. Rage bait works through provocative framing, rather than facts; creating false dilemmas; and de-contextualizing or exaggerating normal situations. An example would be posting a video clip of someone shouting to insinuate that that is their regular style, when it is, in fact, a one-off. Rage bait often succeeds because it quickly incites emotions, increasing comments and shares while exploiting people’s differences and alliances, ultimately boosting engagement metrics for the concerned online platforms. Though similar in meaning to an older term, “click bait”, it distinguishes itself by eliciting anger.

Oxford’s runner up for the year 2025 was “aura farming”, focusing on the impression you make online: projecting charisma and strength or appearing cool as part of an impressive public image, which naturally could be divorced from reality. In any case, it always involves a deliberate effort. Humorous examples that come to mind would be adjusting your sunglasses while indoors or pretending to text while actually opening your calculator. Other scenarios could involve walking slowly towards the camera or trying different poses.

Collins found “vibe coding” to be the most important expression of the year, referring to “the use of AI prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code”. According to the dictionary, the term was made popular by Andrej Karpathy, the former Director of AI at Tesla and the founding engineer at OpenAI. He used it to reflect how AI encourages creativity while saving users the hassle of writing code themselves. An example in creative writing would be prompting an AI to create a character that is simultaneously manic and autistic.

Merriam-Webster’s chosen term “slop” is defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”. It may be linked to last year’s “brain rot”, but with special emphasis on large quantities and AI involvement. It may also draw on the above concepts of rage bait, clickbait, and aura farming, while being generated through vibe coding.