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.
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Here are some of the words of 2025 so far:
Cambridge Dictionary: parasocial
The Cambridge Dictionary, which has published a word of the year since 2015, looked at a sustained trend of increased searches before making its latest choice—“parasocial,” which it defines 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.”
University of Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl first coined the term in their 1956 academic article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction.” The word combines “social” with the Greek-derived prefix para-, which in this case means “similar to or parallel to, but separate from.”
Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor Colin McIntosh said that “public interest in the term increased massively this year,” based on dictionary search data as well as Google searches. Cambridge noted that dictionary searches for the word spiked on June 30, around the time when YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial.”
“It’s interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts,” McIntosh said of the word.
In its press release, the dictionary said 2025 spotlighted parasocial relationships with celebrities, including the fanfare surrounding 2023 TIME Person of the Year Taylor Swift and her August engagement to NFL-superstar boyfriend Travis Kelce, but it also highlighted how humans have increasingly turned to artificial-intelligence chatbots for friendships and even romantic relationships.
Collins Dictionary: vibe coding
Collins English Dictionary, which has announced a word of the year since 2013, embraced the tech industry in its choice of the word of 2025. It picked “vibe coding,” a slang term which it defines as “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” As a blog post further describes it: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.”
Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI and a former AI director at Tesla, coined the term. In an X post in February, Karpathy described it as a type of computer coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” In vibe coding, large language models do the heavy lifting on creating programming code. While it’s been lauded for democratizing the coding process, the method has also been criticized for bypassing foundational knowledge of code and its potential security risks.
Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said the choice “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.”
Several other technology-related terms made it to Collins’ shortlist, including “clanker”—a derogatory term with Star Wars origins used to describe robots, computers, and AI sources—and “broligarchy,” in seeming reference to the male-dominated Silicon Valley elite and their potential to wield political influence.
Dictionary.com: 67
Dictionary.com, which has announced a “word of the year” since 2010, made an unusual choice for 2025, picking a number rather than a word. The online dictionary said it selected 67 (pronounced “six-seven,” not “sixty-seven”) after analyzing troves of data including headlines, social media trends, and search engine results. It said in its October announcement that the search for 67 “experienced a dramatic rise beginning in the summer,” increasing more than six times since June.
The term appears to come from the 2024 song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by rapper Skrilla, which has since become a popular backing tune for videos on TikTok and Instagram. Some of those videos were of LaMelo Ball of the Charlotte Hornets, whose height hovers around 6 ft. 7 in., while other videos were of teenagers and children using the term.
But the “word” of the year’s exact meaning is elusive. “It’s complicated,” says Dictionary.com. “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.” It added there was a bit of teasing undertone to it: “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,” Dictionary.com added. “It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brainrot.”
The post 2025’s Words of the Year, So Far appeared first on TIME.
