What Salicylic Acid is, how it works on skin, its benefits for acne and oily skin, types of products, potential side effects, and how to use it safely.
A clear, chronological overview of key Jane Austen film and TV adaptations, including major BBC mini-series and well-known cinema versions of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.
Word of the Year 2025 Round-Up: From “Slop” to “Rage Bait”
An overview of the 2025 Words of the Year from major dictionaries, exploring terms like “slop”, “rage bait,” and “vibe coding,” and the societal trends they reflect.
Each December, major dictionaries try to capture the feeling of the last 12 months in a single word. It’s usually a good way to measure the global mood. Previous years gave us “goblin mode” or “rizz”. But 2025? The words for this year look a bit negative. But they are also funny, if you have a dark sense of humour.
We’ve looked at the announcements from Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Collins, and others to bring you a simple guide to the words that defined 2025. Whether you love language, are just trying to understand what your younger cousin is saying, or are navigating multilingual content online with tools like Mate Translate, let’s explore the vocabulary of a very weird year.
Oxford’s Choice: Rage Bait
Definition: 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.
Oxford University Press selected “rage bait” as its 2025 Word of the Year. The term describes online content deliberately engineered to elicit anger or outrage, typically to increase traffic or engagement.
Merriam-Webster: Slop
Definition: Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
Merriam-Webster chose “slop” for 2025, reflecting widespread frustration with AI-generated drivel flooding social platforms, publishing channels, and information ecosystems. Where previous technological advances promised efficiency or creativity, AI’s most visible contribution has been mountains of mediocre text and images clogging our feeds.
Collins Dictionary: Vibe Coding
Definition: The use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.
Collins selected “vibe coding,” a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former director of AI. The phrase refers to generating software code by describing desired outcomes to an AI in natural language, rather than writing code manually.
Cambridge Dictionary: Parasocial
Definition: Involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they don’t know, a character in a book, film, TV series, or an artificial intelligence.
Cambridge chose “parasocial,” describing one-sided relationships in which people invest emotional energy in someone or something that doesn’t know they exist – influencers, celebrities, fictional characters, and, increasingly, AI chatbots.
Dictionary.com: 67
Definition: Largely nonsensical; sometimes interpreted as “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” particularly when paired with a hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately.
Dictionary.com selected the number “67” as its Word of the Year. Pronounced “six-seven,” it became Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z slang for chaos, confusion, or simply “whatever.” The term originated from internet memes and a viral song before evolving into a deliberately meaningless response designed to baffle anyone over twenty-five.
What does it actually mean? That’s rather the point-it means nothing and everything. A linguistic shrug. A textual equivalent of ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Final Thoughts
The 2025 Words of the Year serve as linguistic markers charting our evolving relationship with technology and truth. These terms document a year in which society continued to grapple with the practical realities of a deeply integrated digital world.
Here’s to 2026. Hopefully, the word of the year will be something nice, like “nap” or “peace.” But looking at the trajectory from goblin mode to slop, I wouldn’t bet on it.
