By Gail Flanagan
Publication Date: 2025-12-16 16:34:00
For us linguists, the deluge of “Word of the Year” announcements from dictionaries and publishers is a holiday tradition, as expected as mince pies. Not only are Words of the Year an entertaining look at new slang and language changes, they also tell us a lot about the concerns, trends and obsessions of the English-speaking world.
And this year’s list has a clear theme. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) played a huge role in our offices, social media feeds, music and movies, and now dictionaries.
One of the first announcements this year was Collins Dictionary choosing “Vibe Coding” as its word of the year. Vibe coding refers to using AI tools to generate code instead of manually coding software programs.
When I first heard this, my initial reaction was that this is a very niche phrase that isn’t in most people’s vocabulary. However, if we look back at the Cambridge Dictionary’s selection for 2023 – which was “hallucinate” and referred to the…