The taste of anger, the status of the goblin… Do the words of the year have any real value? | language

If you’ve seen a news story announcing the chosen “Word of the Year” for 2025 in recent weeks, you might be forgiven for asking yourself: What, another word?

Depending on which dictionary you turn to, the term chosen this year was either Collins’s “coding of emotions”, Cambridge Dictionaries’ “antisocial”, or rival Oxford University Press’s “taste of anger” – with many other choices besides.

Since its origins 35 years ago, when the American Dialect Society tried to find a word capable of summing up the past 12 months, this particular Americanism crossed the Atlantic in the mid-2000s and has since established itself as the closest thing in the English language to awards season.

“There are dozens now,” said Jonathan Green, an author and lexicographer who specializes in the evolution of vernacular language. “It seems to me that if you have anything to do with publishing a reference book, or certainly a dictionary of some sort, it is your duty to come up with one of these things.”

Other linguists suggest that the final choices are chosen more to capture the audience’s attention than any deep linguistic analysis.

Robbie Love, a sociolinguist at Aston University in Birmingham, says that the lexicographers behind the selections are themselves aware that it is not a “completely objective scientific process”, otherwise “you [would] Look for the same words…they will all guarantee they are different.

Vaclav Brezina, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, said: “The word of the year considerations are rather narrow, as it is a word that captures people’s imagination and the imagination of lexicographers in that particular year.

“I don’t think the purpose of the Word of the Year is to provide a scientific analysis of the English language… [it] It’s more to get our attention.”

And based on data analysis by The Guardian, which measured the frequency of use of words of the year chosen by Cambridge, Collins and Oxford since 2010, much of this fiction is increasingly being crafted online. More than a third of the words selected are either internet slang terms or owe their meanings to technological devices. The number rises to two-thirds for words of the year as of 2021.

Lynn Murphy, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, was not surprised. “I think this is inevitable because that’s how easily words spread these days. So, everyone is becoming more aware of new words. There’s also the fact that we’re in a really active time of technological change.”

However, with the fleeting nature of much online content, it is perhaps to be expected that many previously chosen words will not stand the test of time. Oxford’s choice in 2022 of “goblin mode” – “a type of behavior that is unapologetically self-indulgent… in a way that rejects social norms or expectations” – may have been a wake-up call but is now rarely used. Cambridge’s 2018 selection, “nomophobia” – the fear of being without your phone – is similarly ambiguous. The use of NFTs or non-fungible tokens (Collins, 2021) and “youthquake” (Oxford, 2017) have also declined significantly, by 96% and 92% respectively, according to analysis by the News on the Web group.

Some have lost popularity for good reason. Words like Brexit, the vaccine shot, and quarantine have spoken of a particular period in social history whose urgency may have faded, even as their effects continue to be felt. Other factors, including austerity and the climate emergency, have waxed and waned along with political developments and shifting priorities, although it is difficult to imagine the “Big Society” described by David Cameron ever returning.

Regarding the lack of longevity, Jonathan Dent, a senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, said: “Whether the word of the year remains an active and widely recognized part of the language in the long term is actually less important.” [than] It has something to say about where we are now, this year.

“If a word nominated for Word of the Year maintains the kind of usage that led to its selection, that’s a sign that English speakers and writers found it a useful addition to their linguistic toolkit. If not, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a relevant and worthwhile choice in the year it was chosen.”

While some linguists like Murphy can be “a bit cynical about some dictionary words over the years being about attracting attention” and regard the annual ritual as a “marketing tool,” others view the practice with less suspicion.

“I won’t explain in any way,” Love said [word of the year] As a prediction in some way of how this word will be used in the future.

“I think it’s just a fun way to get people talking about language, and especially if they’re choosing words fairly consistently that young people are more likely to use in online discourse, it’s a great way to engage young people in these kinds of conversations about language and words.”

In short: Don’t expect the word of the year to last much longer.

“It’s marketing,” Green said. “Whether it works, I mean that’s another aspect of it… [but] Is this really something that the audience feels like, “This sums up the year I just had”?