Everyone is beyond 2025.
Various platforms and dictionaries announced their word of the year in December, and the choices broadly reflect the technology industry's inevitable uncertainty, exhaustion, and skepticism.
“There's no denying that 2025 was a year defined by the question of who we truly are, both online and offline,” said Casper Grasswohl, president of Oxford Languages.
From early job seekers who find themselves unemployed, to social media content that doesn't move the conversation at all, to workers struggling to keep up with AI, here's a list of words that dictionaries and culture watchers say sum up the zeitgeist of 2025.
Glassdoor: “Fatigue”
Job search platform Glassdoor says workers are tired.
The site, which allows employees to post reviews of companies they've worked for or interviewed for, coined “fatigue” as its word of the year and has since seen mentions of the term jump 41% across the platform in 2025.
Glassdoor cited job seekers becoming increasingly frustrated with endless applications that lead nowhere, and workers being mentally exhausted by the rapid rise of AI.
When Glassdoor asked experts if they feel the news cycle drains their energy at work, 78% said yes. Add to that the growing number of “job huggers” clinging to their positions in a job market with fewer and fewer openings, and job seekers are becoming increasingly dissatisfied.
“Things could certainly get better, but they could also get worse,” Glassdoor wrote in a sarcastic admonishment.
Collins Dictionary: “vibe coding”
“Vibecoding” is a term coined by prominent AI researcher Andrei Karpathy to refer to using natural language prompts to instruct an AI to write computer code, rather than writing it from scratch.
Mr Collins said this year's word and its nominees signaled “further transition to a technology-driven world”.
OpenAI's annual enterprise report found a 36% increase in code-related queries among employees whose primary job is not engineering. Companies like Anthropic also said that their in-house AI Claude now writes 90% of the code for their teams.
Oxford Dictionary: “Food for anger”
If you've ever felt so angry about online content that you felt like reposting it and venting your feelings in the comments section, you may have come across Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year: “Anger Fodder.”
The University of Oxford defined the term as “online content intentionally designed to elicit anger or outrage by being irritating, provocative, or offensive, and typically posted to increase traffic or engagement.”
According to data from the University of Oxford, the use of “anger bait” will triple in 2025 compared to the previous year, suggesting that “deeper changes are occurring in the way we talk about attention – both how we give it and how we seek it.”
Cambridge Dictionary: “parasocial”
Many people seem unable to quit social media. And that could be largely due to “parasocial” relationships, which Cambridge Dictionaries coined as the word of the year.
The term refers to one-sided “relationships people form with celebrities, influencers, and AI chatbots,” says Cambridge Dictionary.
Examples include Taylor Swift's lyrics about heartbreak, the podcast host's spontaneity, and how fans often feel a deep connection to the “emotionally meaningful” and “sometimes awkward” relationships between users and AI chatbots.
Business Insider has documented various instances of people becoming emotionally dependent on AI models or forming long-term relationships with their AI girlfriends. The release of AI companions, including flirtatious anime girls, by platforms like Grock could increase the likelihood of such parasocial relationships.
Macquarie Dictionary: “AI Slop”
The Australian English Dictionary selected “AI slop” as a top word of the year, highlighting concerns about “low-quality content that is often error-ridden and not requested by users” created by generative AI.
The rise of AI-generated content is not only contributing to longer and more cumbersome notes at work, which don't actually improve productivity, but also tricking some news platforms into publishing inaccurate information. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times released an AI-generated summer reading list that matched real authors with books they had never written.
“In recent years, we have learned to become search engineers to find meaningful information, but now we need to become nimble engineers to navigate the challenges of AI,” the Macquarie Dictionary Board said.
Dictionary.com: “67”
Dictionary.com has selected a number (the number 67) as its word of the year for the first time since the site began naming words of the year in 2010.
The word, pronounced “six-seven” instead of “sixty-seven,” has seen a dramatic increase in search volume since the summer of 2025, increasing more than six times since June, according to Dictionary.com.
Described as “meaningless, ubiquitous, pointless,” Dictionary.com believed the word meant “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” and said it has some meaning when you rate something a 6 or 7 out of 10.
Dictionary.com added, “If you're a member of Gen Alpha, you might be grinning at the thought of adults having another hard time understanding the notoriously slippery slang.”
