2025 Words of the Year

Esteemed dictionaries have revealed their top words of the year for 2025.

Social media trends and a tense political climate seemed to have a big impact on dictionary searches and word selections.

Here are the top words of the year:

Slop

Merriam-Webster has identified their word of the year as: Slop. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence” and “broadly : a product of little or no value : rubbish.”

The esteem dictionary stated their editors chose it for all that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters. The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was “soft mud.” In the 1800s it came to mean “food waste” (as in “pig slop”), and then more generally, “rubbish” or “a product of little or no value.”

In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats, slop set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking. The word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.

Other words that stood out in Merriam-Webster’s 2025 lookup data:

Gerrymander
Touch Grass
Performative
Tariff
Six Seven
Conclave
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

67

Dictionary.com has defined the 2025 Word of the Year as: 67. “If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, you might be feeling a familiar vexation at the sight of these two formerly innocuous numerals. If you’re a member of Gen Alpha, however, maybe you’re smirking at the thought of adults once again struggling to make sense of your notoriously slippery slang. And if it’s a surprise to you that 67 (pronounced “six-seven”) is somehow newsworthy, don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” dictionary.com states.

The dictionary states that to select a word of the year their lexicographers analyze a large amount of data including newsworthy headlines, trends on social media, search engine results, and more to identify words that made an impact on our conversations, online and in the real world.

Searches for 67 experienced a dramatic rise beginning in the summer of 2025. Since June, those searches have increased more than sixfold, and so far the surge shows no signs of stopping. Most other two-digit numbers had no meaningful trend over that period, implying that there is something special about 67.

Other words that made Dictionary.com’s short list for 2025:

Agentic
Aura Farming
Broligarchy
Clanker
Gen Z Stare
Kiss Cam
Overtourism
Tariff
Trad Wife

Parasocial

The Cambridge Dictionary picked “parasocial” as their word of the year. The adjective means “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.”

Lookups of parasocial on the Cambridge Dictionary spiked on June 30, 2025, when the YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial”.

The dictionary stated a trend of the term had already increased largely due to debates on social platforms highlighting the ethics of online influencers who may be taking advantage of these types of relationships.

A sustained trend in increased searches for parasocial had already begun, driven in part by debate on social platforms about the ethics of marketers and influencers who take advantage of parasocial relationships.

Although in June 2025, the dictionary states searches surged due to media coverage about Meta and OpenAI and the potential effect of their chatbots on children and mental health. By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence.

Rage Bait

The Oxford Dictionary has chosen the slang term of “rage bait” as its word of the year following a public vote in which more than 30,000 people had their say.

The noun is described as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.”

Oxnard Dictionary states 2025’s news cycle has been dominated by social unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, their experts noticed that the use of rage bait this year has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention—both how it is given and how it is sought after—engagement, and ethics online.

The word has also increased threefold in usage in the last 12 months, according to Oxford’s language data.