Words of the year 2025: Fritinancy edition
How we languaged this year.
It’s the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the Nobels for us word lovers! I’m jumping into the WotY game myself, following the rules established by the American Dialect Society: word-of-the-year eligibility extends to words (or “lexical items”— prefixes, suffixes, multiple-word phrases, punctuation, and acronyms all qualify) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2025. (Want to submit your own nominations to the ADS contest? Use this form.)
I track words all year long, and I do my best to avoid recency bias: the tendency to focus on words that were lately in the news.
The WotY-stakes so far:
The Oxford word of the year is rage bait.
Macquarie Dictionary (Australia) chose AI slop. (I picked slop last year.)
The first-ever Canadian word of the year, chosen by national poll, is maplewash: making things appear more Canadian than they actually are. (-wash and -washing are very productive libfixes. I’ve written about them frequently.)
Cambridge Dictionary (UK) selected parasocial.
Collins Dictionary (UK) picked vibe coding, which is on my list, too.
Lane Greene, language columnist at The Economist, chose slop, which the American Dialect Society (and I) singled out in last year’s WotY contest. (See my November 2024 post.)
Merriam-Webster also picked slop. I’m sensing a theme.
John Kelly, formerly of Dictionary.com, selected fascism as his “etymology of the year.”
James Asher is highlighting a word of the year, plus runners-up, every day in December. Notable picks so far: swazticar, Big Balls, Mar-a-Lago face.
The American Dialect Society will announce its own words of the year in early January; you can still submit your nominations here and see past years’ lists, going back to 1990, here.
This is my seventeenth WotY roundup. You can find links to all of my past lists at the very bottom of this post.
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In the past I have avoided selecting a single word of the year, preferring instead to offer a batch of words that represent a pointillist portrait of the previous twelve months. I’m breaking with that tradition this year. My overall word of the year is . . .
Chaos
Chaos was my word of the week in mid-July, when I wrote about — among other examples — chaos branding, chaos theory, chaos engineering, Trump’s chaos campaign, the cost of chaos, and two new Jurassic Park releases with “chaos” in their subtitles.
Since then, chaos has spread. It’s the word headline-writers now prefer — by far — to such synonyms as disorder, confusion, disarray, or shambles. It’s hardly a new word, with roots in ancient Greek. But newly prominent? Widely used? Relevant? Absolutely.
Some of my many sightings:
The celebratory chaos of the season: Description of a festive New Yorker cover, December 15.
Airport chaos: It’s leading people “to ride the [sic] Amtrak.” The Atlantic, November 15.
Immigration courts thrown into chaos: Politico, December 6.
Parking chaos: In San Francisco’s Mission District, purportedly caused by the “AI boom.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 6.
Chaos in the Caribbean: Brought about by the Trump administration. The New Yorker, December 7.
DOGE is in chaos: Politico, November 22.
The EPA is in chaos: Wired, November 10.
Chaos at the CDC: The Conversation, September 1.
Chaos at the Justice Department: New York Times, November 17.
Democratic National Committee in chaos: New York Times, June 18.
Chaos prevails at the Pentagon: Thanks to warfighter bro Hegseth. New York Times, April 22.
There was a new Danish TV series called Chaos. There was a new Errol Morris documentary called Chaos: The Manson Murders. There was a new “survival horror” game called Total Chaos (“more than 20 years in the making”). Good Chaos is the name of the British production company behind Left-Handed Girl, the 2025 Taiwanese feature film currently streaming on Netflix.
Sometimes the adjective chaotic is used instead: A potential tariff refund fight is already chaotic (Axios, December 15). Congress turns chaotic (WSJ, November 22). Chaotic vaccine debate (Public Health Communictions Collaborative, September 21). The 7 best takedowns of a chaotic 2025 (Salon, December 12).
And we’re not out of the woods yet: Chaos is coming (The Bulwark, December 5).
Why so much chaos? Headline-writers appreciate its brevity, but other words are just as short or shorter: mess, havoc, snafu, melee, fiasco. We default to chaos because, as systems break down and democracies fray and dissolve around the globe, we can’t find a better way to express our sense of helplessness. Chaos is the opposite of control. The word’s very antiquity suggests deep, intractable, mythical roots. And chaos begets more chaos.
Read my July 14 post about chaos:
The rest of the list
Government and law
Dismantle. An old verb to describe what the Trump administration is doing to, well, everything (except the stuff that matters to his billionaire cronies and hangers-on). Read my March 10 post.
DOGE. An acronym based on a lie based on a meme. There was no “department” and “governmental efficiency” never materialized. It became a verb (“You’ve been DOGEd!”) and a combining form (“DOGEbags”). For more, see my May 5 post.
Kavanaugh stop. Detention of U.S. citizens by Homeland Security goons, an activity blithely sanctioned by Supreme Court Justice Brett (“I like beer”) Kavanaugh in his September 8 concurrence to a decision holding that “you can absolutely detain people based on looking Latino, speaking Spanish, working certain jobs, and being in certain locations. … Drexel law professor Anil Kalhan quickly dubbed these bullshit pretextual stops of US citizens as ‘Kavanaugh stops’ and the name has stuck.” (Techdirt).
#NoKings. The slogan of the year: a rallying cry for countless marches and peaceful protests throughout the year, but especially on June 14. “The president thinks his rule is absolute,” declared the NoKings.org website. “But in America, we don’t have kings — and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty.” (Chaos again!)
Thank you for your attention to this matter! “At least 10 of Trump’s Truth Social posts in the past two months have ended this way, alternately confounding and delighting those who come upon them. He’s deployed the idiom so much, in fact, and in such unusual contexts, it’s now found a second life as a viral meme and multipurpose catchphrase.” (Fast Company, April 23.)
Economy
Affordability. An oldish word for inexpensiveness — it first appeared in 1910, in an ad for “the overland car” in the Indianapolis Star — that in 2025 came to be the one-word shorthand for Americans’ economic anxiety. The president now calls affordability — an issue he campaigned on in 2024 — “a hoax” and a “con job.” He is, of course, an expert on hoaxes and con jobs.
Grindcore/996. Grinding away 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week is a sign of virtue in Silicon Valley, and maybe the only way to stay ahead of our AI overlords. See my October 6 post.
Groceries. “A bag with different things in it,” according to Donald J. Trump, who couldn’t stop marveling over the “old-fashioned word” that he seemed to have recently discovered. See my April 7 post.
Tariff. A big part of the affordability story. See my April 14 post and this November 10 Economist story: “Companies will struggle to stay on top of tariff chaos.” (More chaos!)
Agentic. First used in the 19th and early 20th century to describe chemical agents, the adjective began being applied in the 2010s to artificial intelligence, according to Merriam-Webster. It gained prominence in 2024 and 2025 as a way “to describe computer applications designed to automate certain tasks. . . . An agentic AI, for example, might be designed to receive and resolve a customer service issue, such as refunding money or resetting a password, without any human oversight in any step of the process.”
Clanker. A decades-old sci-fi slang term for “robot” was repurposed as a slur for an AI agent. Read my September 1 post.
Em dash. Is it “a telltale sign” of AI-generated prose? A lot of people began to suspect as much this year. Some of them took to calling the punctuation mark — you know the one, beloved of Emily Dickinson and countless other dead and living writers — an “elongated hyphen” or “the ChatGPT hyphen.” The argument pushed the normally even-tempered Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to exasperation: “[A]ll the writing you see coming out of tools like ChatGPT are the way they are because they were trained on human writing,” she told LA Times language columnist June Casagrande in August. “The only way em dashes would be in there is if people used them.” In July, a huffy em dash (channeled by Greg Mania) responded to the “slander” in an article for McSweeney’s: “I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit.”
Vibe coding. Coined in February 2025 to describe “using AI to generate functional code from natural language prompts.” See my September 8 post.
Culture and style
BAB. The accessory of the summer, at least among TikTok fashionistas, was a “big-ass bag,” or BAB. “Big Ass Bag” had surfaced in 2023 as the name of a site that allowed shoppers “to put all their items from various stores into one virtual bag”; the domain for that business is no longer live, and this year’s BAB is something different: a “ludicrously capacious bag,” as a character on Succession put it. “A BAB can come in all shapes and sizes, and has no required designer pedigree,” the New York Times informed us. The phenomenon known as -ass intensification isn’t new; I wrote about it in 2013.
Bixie. “Think of the bixie as a bob that flirts with the spirit of a pixie: short, cool, and bursting with texture,” suggested Women’s Health (UK). The style was “the biggest haircut trend of 2025,” according to Cosmopolitan. In some quarters it’s being called the Rama, in honor of bixie-wearer Rama Duwaji, wife of incoming New York mayor Zoran Mamdani.
Labubu. In 2025 the It accessory for your BAB — or your canvas backpack — was a Labubu, a plush “monster” with big ears and a pointy-toothed grin. The collectible toy, which could be attached to bags like a charm, was developed by Hong Kong–born, Netherlands-raised illustrator Kasing Lung, who was influenced by Nordic folklore. Labubus have been described as “kind-hearted and eager to help — though their good intentions can sometimes lead to chaos.” (More chaos!) “Labubu” has no meaning beyond its playful sound. In June, a four-foot-tall Labubu sold for $170,000 at a Beijing auction. Labubus also inspired counterfeits dubbed “Lafufus.”
Performative male. If you see a young man carrying a tote bag bedecked with a Labubu or three, he may be a performative male, “a new Gen Z term describing young men who deliberately craft a soft, sensitive, emotionally aware aesthetic, signalling the rejection of ‘toxic masculinity’” (The Conversation). In 2025 you could rate your “performity” with an online quiz or take part in one of many performative-male contests. “Many [young men] cheekily post videos of themselves reading dense books, upside down, or carrying three or four or five Labubus to exaggerate the aesthetic,” the New York Times reported in August. It was another twist in the transformation of performative from a philosophical concept to a synonym for “inauthentic.”
Pickle. The flavor of the year, adding tang to countless comestibles from potato chips to hard seltzer to ice cream and lending whimsy to adhesive bandages, microfiber cloths, and earrings. How trendy are pickles? Hot girls are selling them, Snaxshot reported on December 1. For more, see my April 21 post.
My midyear WotY picks:
My previous WotY lists:
2024 (couch-fucker, slop, tunnel fit, and more)
2023 (enshittification, quiet luxury, indict, and more)
2022 (AI, quiet quitting, long Covid, and more)
2021 (boosted, insurrection, shacket, and more)
2020 (Before Time, doomscrolling, pandemic, and more)
2019 (hamberder, OK boomer, squad, and more)
2018 (shithole, white caller crime, tender age shelter, and more)
2017 (reckoning, pussyhat, #MeToo, and more)
2016 (bigly, deplorables, woke, and more)
2015 (refugee, Mx., ghosting, and more)
2014 (Ebola, precariat, budtender, and more)
2013 (Obamacare, binge-watching, selfie, and more)
2012 (fiscal cliff, stockist, unskew, and more)
2011 (Arab spring, curate, planking, and more)
2010 (cannabiz, hashtag, vuvuzela, and more)
2009 (app, death panel, zombie, and more)
Another thing about 'chaos' (and 'chaotic') is that it still looks and sounds alien, even though it has been in English for a while. For example, that 'ao' sequence is very rare in short words, and is not always pronounced as separate sounds. I could only think of a few other moderately common short words, such as 'aorta', 'cacao', 'ciao' (pronounced like 'chow'), 'gaol' (UK spelling of 'jail', pronounced the same way), 'kaolin', 'karaoke' (definitely a recent import'), 'pharaoh' (one of the all-time weirdest words in English, not the least because the second A is silent) and 'tao'. Yep, 'chaos' is one of the aliens.
I think "chaos" covers it. And the entire world is just getting started.