Think of it as a word in time. It is the season for dictionaries, news companies, and other outlets to announce their Word of the Year. Wordwise, 2025, and I were not on good terms or even on the same terms. The year 2025 saw more words of warning than words of wisdom.
Cambridge Dictionary, for example, pointed out a phenomenon that might be a sad sign of our times: “Parasocial.” It defined it 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.”
To be fair, it is not entirely new. “Swiftie,” a fan of Taylor Swift, made it to the Oxford Word of the Year shortlist for 2023, after all. And there have long been movie fans and cults and people like me who cry when a character is killed off in a TV series. The twist is in the relationship to AI, and it can be twisted indeed.
“What does it say about 2025?” asked Cambridge Dictionary. “In 2025, following the release of personalized AI chatbots by multiple companies the preceding year, public discussion about the psychological impact of parasocial relationships expanded from being mainly about influencers and celebrities to including the benefits and dangers of chatbots.”
Young users in particular are at risk of developing a one-sided relationship with a chatbot, sometimes with tragic results.
Oxford University Press also had something both very real and very virtual as its Word of the Year: “Rage bait.” This was defined 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.”
Brain rot: mental drain of endless scrolling
Some people are naturally annoying; others do it on purpose. Add to that the bots, and it’s not a pretty picture of the times. As the Oxford press release put it: “Where last year’s choice, brain rot, captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks. And together, they form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted. These words don’t just define trends; they reveal how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behavior.”
The other two top contenders for OUP’s Word of the Year were “aura farming” – “The cultivation of an impressive, attractive, or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique” –and “biohack”: “to attempt to improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity, or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine, or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.”
Both “aura farming” and “biohack” also appeared on the shortlist for the Collins Dictionary and publishing company’s 2025 Word of the Year, but ultimately, they went with “Vibe coding.” A blog on the Collins site sums it up as: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It’s programming by vibes, not variables.”
“Clanker,” a derogatory term for computers, robots, or AI sources, was also shortlisted by several organizations. It was popularized by Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which definitely has a parasocial following.
Dictionary.com seemed to be lost for words and opted for numbers instead: 67 (“also spelled ‘6-7’”). It is a “figure of speech,” rather than a newly coined phrase. If you don’t know what it means, you’re not alone.
Explaining its choice, Dictionary.com wrote: “If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, you might be feeling a familiar vexation at the sight of these two formerly innocuous numerals... And if it’s a surprise to you that 67 (pronounced ‘six-seven’) is somehow newsworthy, don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means...
“Some say it means ‘so-so,’ or ‘maybe this, maybe that,’ especially when paired with its signature hand gesture, where both palms face up and move alternately up and down. Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question.”
“Gen Alpha” has its own way with words, it seems.
I dedicated a column to the subject of AI “slop” in September, in honor of the Jewish New Year (“My Word: Seeing is not believing in the AI age.”) It says a lot about our times. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary selected “AI slop” as its word for 2025, defined as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.”
The Macquarie committee said when declaring its winner: “...While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop... The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?”
“Slop” also made it to the top of the list for Merriam-Webster and The Economist. The latter at least tried to find a bright side: “If social media sites become congested with slop, either those platforms will have to get serious about content moderation or else their users will shut them off. A case, then, for sloptimism?”
There is no doubt in my mind – hopefully not too infected by “brain rot” – that the slop, fake news, cyber bullying, and extremism in social media “echo chambers” help create a fertile climate for antisemitism (and other hate crimes), with lethal results. “Antisemitism” is not a loaded word when you’re facing a jihadist with a loaded gun. We got another reminder of this in the horrific terror attack in which 15 people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach this month.
Here in Israel – “Between the river and the sea” – we are still suffering from the ongoing trauma of October 7, 2023, the Iranian-funded, Hamas-led invasion and mega-atrocity in which 1,200 were killed and 251 abducted to Gaza. The subsequent war and the hundreds of thousands of rockets, missiles, and killer drones have also left their mark, physical and psychological.
We are also the victims of a war of words being waged against us in which “Holocaust,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” feature prominently. If there were an antisemite’s word of the year, it would probably be “famine.” The words “blood libel” have made a comeback in the Jewish world following the widespread lies that Israel was causing deliberate mass starvation in Gaza. The falsehoods fueled more terror attacks on Jewish targets around the globe.
I have only words of praise for those Jews and their too-few open allies who are bravely fighting back. Too many leaders – national, local, and university heads – are full of empty words when they promise to tackle antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which are practically synonymous.
The Hebrew Language Academy is unfashionably late announcing its Word of the Year. The word for 2025 will be revealed on Hebrew Language Day, the 21st of Tevet (this year, January 8). That is the birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, considered to be behind the revival of Hebrew as a modern language.
The HLA offered the public the opportunity to submit suggested words, but at the time of this writing, has yet to publish the shortlist. Reflecting our situation in 2024, the Hebrew word for “hostages,” “hatufim,” won by a massive majority.
Following the hostage release deal in October this year, which saw the return of all the live hostages and all the bodies of captives, except for police officer Ran Gvili, I suggested that this year’s word (or words) of the year be “paduy shevi,” “redeemed captive.” Opting for an acronym, as Hebrew-speakers so often do, a friend proposed “hatlash” for “hatuf leshe’avar” (former hostage).
Elsewhere in the Hebrew media, there is a lively discussion over the word for “war veteran.” Or the lack of it. Surprisingly, although there is “miluimnik for “reservist,” the word “veteran” is usually reserved for World War II vets.
Mark my words, phenomena we’ve witnessed this year will continue to evolve, like language itself. The year might be ending, and with it the first quarter of the century, but 2025 has not had its last word.