Word of the year for 2025: All sorts of picks have been made but here’s one that deserves the crown

The choice is made through some form of fan voting or editorial discretion. This annual exercise takes place in many languages, including Danish, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and, of course, English. Note what’s missing.

English is the lingua franca of many countries and most have their own words of the year. England leads with choices from heavyweights like the Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, The Economist and the bossy Oxford Dictionaries, which anoints separate words for the UK and US and even had the short-lived gall to do it for Hindi. Imagine!

America must have its own of everything (not just sports) and is represented by the American Dialect Society, Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster. Australia is almost as insistent on its uniqueness and offers us choices from the Australian National Dictionary and Macquarie Dictionary. Okay, we get it: word meanings are culturally specific (like ‘pass out’ or ‘backward’ in Indian vs American English).

Some of the winning words have lasted. The American Dialect Society has been doing this from 1990 and seems to be quite good at picking durable ones: information superhighway (1993), weapons of mass destruction (2002), truthiness (2005, also chosen by Merriam-Webster) and fake news (2017, also chosen by Macquarie and Collins). Collins has other solid ones with staying power: photobomb (2014), binge-watch (2015) and lockdown (2020; variants like covid, quarantine and pandemic were chosen by others that year). Oxford got a few good ones, like carbon footprint (2007) and selfie (2014).

Most chosen words, however, turned out to be ephemeral—tiny attention bubbles that popped like most pop culture fads. Who remembers Oxford winners like chav (2004), bovvered (2006), locavore (2007), hypermiling (2008), youthquake (2017) or rizz (2023)?

Much of this impermanence comes from the tendency to magnify the impact of words that are new and therefore connected to technology or social media or rich-world youth.

For 2025, Collins considered aura framing and biohacking and chose vibe coding. Oxford also shortlisted aura farming and biohack before choosing rage bait. The most popular choice for the year was AI slop (picked by The Economist, Macquarie and Merriam-Webster).

Do you know what these words mean? Will anyone remember what they mean after five years? From trendy to obscurity is a very short cycle for most of these words.

Meanwhile, the word that roiled the world in 2025, one that I suspect is understood in all countries and languages, went almost unnoticed. It is tariff (the “most beautiful word” according to US President Donald Trump).

Only Dictionary.com had it in its shortlist but it ended up selecting 67, which is not really a word, but some Gen Alpha slang that selectors themselves are “still trying to figure out exactly what it means.”

Similarly, for 2012, the year of the Arab Spring, the chosen words were phantom vibration syndrome, omnishambles, bluster, #hashtag, etc. As if a new phenomenon that created a new term and affected the lives of millions had simply never happened. As if the world ended at the navels of barely pubescent brats (word of the year, 2024, Collins) endlessly scrolling through whatever.

Just because the selection process is arbitrary and unscientific doesn’t mean that we can’t have any standards.

I suggest that the time has come for a global word of the year. There may not be an obvious choice every year (thank goodness), but too often there are years that spawn words that rattle and shake the world. Pandemic in 2020, tariff in 2025. Gaza is an honourable mention, but I nominate tariff as the global word of the year.

We also need an Indian word of the year—not Hindi or English, but Indian. Earlier, I had mentioned Oxford’s brief colonial excursion into selecting Hindi words. For the unnaturally curious, they were: Aadhaar (2017, selected over notebandi), Nari Shakti (2018), Samvidhan (2019, to mark the abrogation of Article 370), and Atmanirbharta (2020, not lockdown or mahamaari).

Then, for reasons unknown to me, it stopped. It’s up to us to plant our flag on this now unoccupied land.

Following my own arbitrary methodology (which is roughly in line with the standards of this game and pretty much all ranking games of beauty, colleges, restaurants, movies, et al), I nominate four candidates in the following order.

SIR (Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls) began in late October and is still both underway and generating headlines; along with Bangladeshi, it is in the early running for word of the year in 2026. This is not SIR’s year.

Operation Sindoor lasted only about four days but has since become a potent political symbol and the source of a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. It could have won in most other years but only receives an honourable mention for 2025.

Tariff needs no further taareef (praise) as a candidate. But, since I have already awarded it global word of the year, I must look elsewhere.

The winner is a once-in-144 years (or multiple lifetimes) event. It ran for about 45 days, and if official sources are to be believed, was visited by 660 million people, which would make it the largest festival of any kind anywhere in human history. Because it is something that happens only in India and could happen at this scale only in India; my Indian word of the year is Mahakumbh. Eat your heart out, AI slop.

The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.