Words of the Year 2025

Every year, major dictionaries and language organizations announce their Word of the Year (WOTY) in December or January. The winning word is often a term that captures something essential about how we used language over the past 12 months. Sometimes the choice is obvious (e.g., pandemic in 2020), while other choices reflect deeper cultural and linguistic shifts.

And every January, editor Mark Allen hosts a discussion about the WOTY in his webinar called That Word Chat, where he invites experts from dictionaries and other major publishers to explain their choices.

What made 2025 especially interesting is that many dictionaries and language experts gravitated toward the same idea (and even the same word in some cases). The recurring theme that emerged in 2025 was our growing discomfort with low-quality information, online manipulation, and questions of authenticity in the age of AI.

Here’s a breakdown of the most talked-about WOTY contenders and winners this year and what they can teach us (and our students) about modern English.

Slop

The word slop was chosen as the 2025 WOTY by no fewer than four publications (Merriam-Webster, the American Dialect Society, the Economist magazine, and Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary). According to Peter Sokolowski (Merriam-Webster), slop saw a huge increase in lookups—not for its traditional meaning (waste or animal feed), but for its new sense:

slop: low-quality, mass-produced content flooding the internet, often generated by AI

Reasons why it was chosen:

• It reflects distrust of online information.
• It joins words like gaslighting, catfishing, trolling, and deepfake.
• It highlights how much we value authenticity—perhaps more than ever.

As Ben Zimmer (American Dialect Society) pointed out, slop has become so prominent that people no longer need to say the original, longer version, which was AI slop. We even hear slop expanding to other areas, such as work slop and friend slop.

Rage bait

Oxford Languages’ WOTY for 2025 is rage bait. Unlike most other dictionaries, which choose their WOTY based on the number of lookups, Oxford chooses theirs based on the corpus data (i.e., tracking which words show the biggest year-over-year growth in real usage).

rage bait: content deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage, especially online, in order to drive engagement, clicks, or shares

According to Fiona McPherson (Oxford English Dictionary), rage bait has narrowed to describe online manipulation—not real-life situations such as road rage. 

Reasons why it was chosen:

• It reflects increased awareness that our emotions are being exploited online.
• It follows a productive pattern (clickbait, love bait, Oscar bait).
• It also won Oxford’s public vote by a wide margin.

Other notable Words of the Year

• 67 (Dictonary.com; also spelled 6-7 or 6 7): so-so, this or that, maybe (though some people argue it has no meaning at all and is simply a phrase that youth use to confuse and frustrate adults)
• parasocial (Cambridge): a one-sided relationship in which a person feels emotionally connected to a public figure or influencer who does not know them personally
• vibe coding (Collins): an informal approach to programming where developers describe desired outcomes instead of writing detailed instructions, and then rely on AI to generate the code
• brain rot (Oxford's WOTY in 2024; American Dialect Society's runner-up in 2025): the mental fatigue, reduced attention, or sense of cognitive decline caused by prolonged exposure to low-quality, repetitive, or overwhelming digital content

Words as time capsules

As Ben Zimmer (American Dialect Society) reminded us in his closing remarks, Words of the Year act as linguistic time capsules. Sometimes they capture a single global event (e.g., COVID). Other times, they reveal subtler shifts, such as changing attitudes toward truth, trust, and technology.

Several speakers noted a relative lack of political WOTY choices for 2025, which itself says something about how cultural anxiety is being expressed more through technology and media language than traditional politics.

WOTY in the classroom

For English teachers, WOTY discussions are a powerful classroom tool in the following ways:

• They show students that English is alive and evolving.
• They encourage critical thinking about media literacy.
• They open conversations about tone, connotation, and register.
• They highlight how culture shapes vocabulary.

Whether you explore slop, rage bait, or another contender with your students, one thing is clear: the language of 2025 reflected a world questioning what—and who—to trust online.