Rage-baiting the slop: Why are the words of the year so weird?

Vibe-coding parasocial rage-bait slop — 6-7!

Word-salad it may seem, this phrase is actually the most important sentence of the year. At least, that’s what the Western world’s various English dictionaries would have us believe; as each represents the “word of the year” (WOTY) selection from a different lexicographic group. 

You’d be excused for seeing a certain pattern here, or being somewhat unhappy about it. From CNN to Fox News, this year’s slew of words-of-the-year have generated what's become a familiar reaction: Questions over whether these sometimes short-lived, sometimes silly — or even nonsensical — words deserve a vaunted place in the hallowed halls of our official language records. 

But given that reaction, why are language experts picking internet-based fads that may fade from use in a year’s time? What arcane process leads to words of the year that vacillate from the brain-numbing (like 2023’s “rizz”) to the politically charged (as in 2021’s “insurrection”)? 

And, given how mad it makes everyone, why are they even bothering to do it at all?

“I am a huge nerd about it, but I obviously really love doing it,” explained Kelly Wright of the American Dialect Society (ADS), a sociolinguist and lexicographer who runs the society's WOTY nomination process.

“It's a lot of fun — It's the most fun I get to have. Most of the other stuff that I do is not fun at all.”

Part of that fun, she says, comes from the selection process — something that varies widely among various determining bodies, and contributes to the kinds of words that make headlines. 

Take Cambridge Dictionary, for example. According to senior editor Jessica Rundell, their process starts with a tech team compiling a master list of the most looked-up words that year — looking for both general increases over the entire year, and spikes localized around a few weeks of intense interest. 

From there, a group of editors will select relevant words from that list they can “build a story around” — in other words, that can be used to encapsulate certain interests, questions or topics that defined that year. In Cambridge’s case, those words already need to be in their dictionary before consideration.

“When we're choosing a word to go into the dictionary, we look at whether we think it's [going] to last,” Rundell said. “If we see a word, and it comes around one year and then the next year people aren't using it, it's not going to go into the dictionary at all.”

This year, that led to “parasocial”: a word with roots back in the 1950s and the beginning of the TV age. They chose it to define this year because its definition and notoriety have shifted considerably in the internet age.

Collins Dictionary takes a different approach. Samantha Eardley, a member of the Collins Dictionary team, says they build their shortlist from the Collins Corpus — an analytical database with over 20 billion words, updated monthly with new words and meanings. 

They, like most deciding bodies, are fine with two words for a winner, as many new English concepts are named by combining two existing words  — despite the ire it occasionally draws from purists. But similarly to Cambridge, if they believe a word is a passing fad, they generally will not opt to pick it as their WOTY — explaining why they picked the “brand new word” of vibe-coding, while specifically choosing to veto the almost definitely ephemeral 6-7.