For us linguists, the flurry of “word of the year” announcements from dictionaries and publishers is a holiday tradition as anticipated as mince pies. The words of the year aren’t just a fun peek into new slang and language changes, they also tell us quite a bit about the worries, trends and obsessions of the English-speaking world.

And this year’s list has one clear theme. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) played a huge role in our offices, social media feeds, music and film, and now – dictionaries.

One of the first announcements this year was Collins Dictionary, who selected “vibe coding” as their word of the year. Vibe coding refers to using AI tools to generate code rather than manually coding software programs.

When I first heard this, my initial reaction was that this is a very niche phrase, not in most people’s vocabulary. However, if we look back to Cambridge Dictionary’s selection for 2023 – which was “hallucinate”, referring to the false or nonsense responses generated by AI models – many people felt the same. Now, we regularly refer to the hallucinogenic properties of AI output, rolling our eyes at some of the answers it provides. Language can and does change, and quickly.

Read more: What are AI hallucinations? Why AIs sometimes make things up

Such output can sometimes be........

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