The evidence was everywhere this year. When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged, fans celebrated like they were on the group chat. Listeners discussed Lily Allen’s breakup album with the proprietary air of a best friend. And viewers of The Summer I Turned Pretty treated the love triangles as a personal matter. We have all become experts in relationships where only one person is actually in the room.
Then we took it a step further and started confiding in AI chatbots. We seek comfort from algorithms that cannot love us back. And when those chatbots respond with too much flattery, we get suspicious. That excessive, insincere praise has a name too, glazing. Every time a famous person told their fans to please stop being so weird online, lookups for parasocial shot up. We needed the word to describe the strange intimacy of talking to a void that talks back.
Parasocial may have won, but it was not the only word trying to capture our attention in 2025. The shortlist was a tour of online chaos, digital anxieties, and the things we buy to feel better about it all.
Here are the words that almost made it:
Slop: This became the perfect insult for the flood of bad AI content. People used it to describe the glitchy images and garbled articles that clogged their feeds, the digital equivalent of factory farmed content.
Delulu: A cheerful way to call someone out for their charmingly unrealistic beliefs. It is the word you use when a fan is convinced their favorite K pop star is secretly waving just to them.
Skibidi: A word that means everything and nothing, which is exactly why it became a viral sensation. It is a nonsense Swiss Army knife for a generation that speaks in inside jokes.
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Tradwife: A modern label for a retro lifestyle. This term for women promoting traditional roles online became a central battleground for debates about gender and nostalgia.
Pseudonymisation: A technical term that went mainstream. It means scrambling your personal data, and its rise in popularity proves we are all finally getting nervous about our digital footprints.
Memeify: The instant a moment, any moment, gets turned into a meme. From political blunders to a stranger’s spilled coffee, nothing was safe from becoming content this year.
Doom spending: The act of spending money you cannot afford to cope with the general feeling that the world is on fire. Although doom spending may provide short term emotional relief, it can also have a long term impact on your financial stability. A lot of people saw the phrase and thought, oh, so that is what I have been doing.
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The linguistic playground was also filled with other newcomers. In K pop circles, your bias is the object of your stanning, your ultimate favorite. As in, My bias is V from BTS, he has the best outfits. A cool spot is not just cool, it is vibey, meaning it has a great buzz and is perfect for people watching. And everyone seems to be trying breathwork, the technique of controlled breathing that promises to ease stress and deliver life changing calm.
But in the end, parasocial won because it named the ubiquitous truth of the year. It is the pull of that one sided bond, whether we direct it at a singer, an influencer, a fictional character, or a friendly AI that might just be glazing us. The Word of the Year does not invent a mood, it just points at it. And in 2025, we were all pointing at our screens, feeling very connected, and very alone.
