Tag Archives: neologisms

Words of 2025

As the year winds down, lexicographers promote their dictionaries with their words of the year. The one that has gotten the most attention so far is the least interesting – vibe-coding. It’s a software development that uses AI to convert natural language into computer code. It doesn’t excite me either.

The Oxford English Dictionary has announced that rage bait is its word of the year. Oxford defines this 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 content.’ It’s click bait’s ugly cousin. The first example that came to my mind was the postings of the current US president, to which we need to add to the OED definition ‘usually to distract the public from certain issues…’

Cambridge’s dictionary has given its vote to 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.’ The word has been around since the 1950s, when it was used in sociopsychology though the concept is even older. Figures like George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte were idolized by people who imagined personal bonds with them as expressed in love letters. The fandom of the early days of Hollywood sparked a whole industry based on imagined intimate relationships with the stars. I confess now that my teenage self had a one-sided relationship with David Bowie. The fact that parasocial has come into popular use in 2025 says something about the times we live in. Are things so bad that our escapism leads us to a place where fictional characters, celebrities, influencers and AI bots become our friends and lovers?

My buddy, Mr Copilot, tells me that Dictionary.com has christened ‘67’ (pronounced 6-7) their word of the year. It’s a slang expression born in TikTok, and while it doesn’t have a fixed meaning, it could mean ‘so-so’ or ‘maybe.’ It’s usually accompanied by a hand gesture – palms up alternating up and down. Like so many slang expressions, its social meaning is more important than its lexical meaning – it’s part of a private language, popular with the young and used to annoy the old. It’s working on me.

Other words that were added this year aren’t new and didn’t make ‘word of the year,’ but are interesting, nonetheless. In 2024 Carol Cadwalladr introduced and popularized the term broligarch, which entered the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025. The fact that others are using this term gives me hope in a perverse way. Broligarch encapsulates the ultra-wealthy tech figures (often male) who wield influence over politics, media and culture. Its growing use and entrance into a dictionary marks public concern – this is where the hope comes in. The broligarchs do not use it to refer to themselves. It’s used despairingly by the rest of us.

Finally, there’s tradwife, which has been around for a few years and was also added in 2025. It refers to ‘a woman who embraces traditional gender roles, especially in marriage and homemaking.’ It’s one thing to be selectively nostalgic – most nostalgia is selective – but it’s something else to desire inequality and financial dependency. My prediction – in five years from now, a couple of neologisms will enter the English lexicon – the verb distradify and the noun liberwife.

What I’ve been reading

A history book that is just that – and not historical fiction, my normal means of learning history. The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith starts with the Age of Exploration and Empire, when European colonial expansion began reshaping global environments through mining, agriculture, and trade. The book then traces environmental disasters of the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century’s fossil fuel boom and finishes with our climate crisis. I’ve been particularly struck by this book’s approach to the slave trade. Where a more traditional history would describe the brutality, human toll, financial gains, abolitionist movement and the US Civil War, this history adds the consequences to biodiversity. One of several examples is sugar, which became an industry due to slavery across North and South America. Amrith sums this up:

“Violence on human beings accompanied a violent assault on the rest of nature. Sugar plantations had a limitless appetite for timber to fire the vats. Furnaces swallowed forests. Woods fell for pasture to feed the domestic animals that were a vital source of muscle power. Denuded hillsides threatened human settlements with mudslides after every rainfall. Sugar ruined the soil.”

The New Yorker, celebrating its 100th anniversary, has reprinted some classics, including the poem ‘At the Fishhouses’ by Elizabeth Bishop. First published in 1947, this highly accessible poem describes a scene of an elderly fisherman untangling a net on the shore. The narrator, observing this, connects with nature and memories and reflects on the concept of knowledge. Like the comments made by Jorie Graham in the current New Yorker, I too found the ending particularly evocative in a literal and linguistic sense:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

So too, are the words we create to communicate this knowledge.

Some Favourite Words of 2020

Not pandemic or woke or clickbait or any of the over-used words that made it to the top of lexicographers’ lists this year. My favourite words of 2020 are those words that have entered my consciousness and left a footprint. Here are just a few.

Princessation – This neologism describes the process of making a girl or young woman feel like a princess, encouraging femininity. I ran into it while reading about a recent study conducted by the Fawcett Society on the dangers in exposing children to gender stereotyping. While the act of princessation has been going on for centuries, the naming of this process is significant. It efficiently sums up behaviours and words and colours them with a negative tint. I think we are making progress.

Blursday – One of these pandemic-inspired words, it refers to the feeling of one day blurring into the next. Working without our usual timetables and having a paucity of choice, doing much of the same thing from the same rooms day in and day out, many of us have no idea what day of the week it is.

Dietrologia – It’s an Italian loanword that pops up now and again in English. I stumbled across it in a short story by Paul Theroux, published in The New Yorker. Dictionary definitions say it refers to hidden motivations behind some action or understood reality. In Italian it’s often used in political journalism and when talking about conspiracy theories. What I find interesting about this word is how it is used in Italian, sometimes on its own, other times with fare (to make). Along with denoting conspiracy theories, it also means ‘second-guessing,’ ‘raking up old history’ or for telling someone their logic is ‘backwards.’ These multiple uses pack conspiracy theories with the connotations they often deserve.

Murderable – I ran into this self-explanatory and nasty word this past month in an article in The Guardian about the reporting of fatal domestic abuse. The author of this piece claimed that some newspapers referred to victims of fatal domestic abuse as ‘murderable,’ which of course sounds horrible and is not surprising given the high prevalence of misogyny in our society. I was going to write about this word, making the point that it nearly always refers to women – an educated guess.  Yet, after I searched two corpora of written British English, I only found two places where this word was used.  In 1920 D.H. Lawrence (some credit him with coining the word) used it in Women in Love: ‘And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.’  The other place this word appeared was in The Guardian article where I found it in the first place. I also searched a couple of websites of the UK’s most popular tabloid papers – nothing.  ‘Murderable’ could be one of those words that is usually spoken and rarely written. As a result of this little research activity, this word appears on my list not to make a feminist point but rather as an example of false expectations and assumptions – especially when it comes to language.

And finally – goldfinch – I’ve never seen one, nor could I identify one, until this year when they started to appear in our town and even in our garden. Thanks to Covid-induced lockdowns, fewer cars and less human activity have allowed fauna to thrive and explore places they might not usually go.  This word and the beautiful little creature that it denotes will always remind me ironically of this otherwise dismal year.