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Choosing The Word of The Year Is No Easy Feat

Stefan Fatsis On The Intense Selection Process That Decides Which Word Will Define Our Year

— Stefan Fatsis | November 13, 2025

Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”

Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.

After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.

Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.

No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.

“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”

Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language.

For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).

Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”

Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.

Adapted from Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary by Stefan Fatsis. Run with the permission of the author, courtesy of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. Copyright (c) 2025 Stefan Fatsis.

A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.

Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.

WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”

Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.

The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.

The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”

The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords.

The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.

Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)

For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.

Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)

Hughes also likes the recent coinage amphifa, referring to anti-ICE protesters in Portland, Ore., and elsewhere who are donning inflatable frog suits. To wear the crown at the dialect society’s meeting in early January in New Orleans, though, the term will likely need to gain traction in social and mainstream media. But it hits what Hughes calls the “sweet spot between creative and accessible.”

“Antifa from its conception is a tough name. With the emphasis on the -ti-, you lose the anti- and people think you’re a terrorist organization,” she says. Amphifa flips the image. “Now that it’s frogs, it’s like, Who’s the bad guys? The ones with guns and balaclavas or the inflatable frogs with little capes?”

I'm not big on horseracing so I'm gonna just use it as an allegory springboard here. 

Rich Strike is a chestnut colt and also a black swan; his odds of winning were supposed to be eighty to one. In the last few seconds of Saturday's race, while the announcer was focused on the two horses in the lead, he surged from behind with astonishing speed and won the Kentucky Derby in the biggest upset. Mostly likely things happen. But mostly is not always. And in retrospect what seemed impossible or unlikely seems inevitable and so we normalize the sheer erratic unpredictability that will surge against the odds again and again.

So what's the takeaway? Don't assume you know what's going to happen and what's impossible. People decide something can't happen and then they make that a self-fulfiling prophecy by not doing anything to make it happen. Or more hopeful people do decide to go for it, and they bring it off after months or years or decades. This is about all the desperate struggles of our time, which are always also imagination struggles: you have to envision that things can be different, that you can win, that what you do might matter. You have to be a gambler, in the best way, not at the track but with history and destiny.

And you know me: I AM THINKING ABOUT CLIMATE ACTION. NOTHING IS MORE WORTH DOING. WE DON'T KNOW THAT WE WILL WIN BY ACTING BUT WE KNOW WE WILL LOSE BY DOING NOTHING. (BUT TO BE A BIT MORE NUANCED, WE HAVE WON SOME SIGNIFICANT THINGS, WE'RE IN THE RACE, AND THIS IS THE DECADE TO SURGE.)

I wrote in 2020: I own a painting of a black swan by the artist Selene Perez of Creativity Explored, which I love because it’s a powerful painting of a bird that looks crowded by the paper it’s on—it looks as though it wants to straighten its neck and spread its wings to escape. I also love it because I believe devoutly in the sheer unpredictability of the future, and a black swan has often been an emblem for that. Or more precisely, “black swan” is a term for something rare but consequential that may look obvious in retrospect but comes as a surprise at the time it happens.The planes flying into the Twin Towers on 9/11. The Berlin Wall falling a dozen years before. 

On the other hand, nuclear meltdowns, pandemics, catastrophic floods and fires were all foreseeable, even if those in charge didn’t prepare for them or prevent them. Donald Trump is essentially a 747 jet made out of lard and lies that flew into the tower of false confidence we had built up in this country. Even if some of us were clenched in horror as we saw him approach, a lot of other people were blindsided.He wasn’t really a black swan because everyone saw him coming; it’s just that a lot of people didn’t think he’d finish the journey. 

If you’re blindsided by climate disasters or Republican corruption, it’s not because they’re black swans; it’s just that you ignored the evidence. A pandemic like this had long been predicted. The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl was waiting to happen, thanks to bad design and bad maintenance protocol. One huge problem with human beings in general, but particularly those who suffer from overconfidence, especially because they think they’re in charge, is that we tend to dismiss the unlikely and prepare for what we think of as the likely, even as we live out a history full of black swans and unlikelihoods.

When I went to Japan a year after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe there, a resident told me that the black wall of water about seventy feet high was unbelievable, even as he was seeing it come at him. We tend to write out the things we’ve taught ourselves are unbelievable and impossible, and sometimes that exclusion is even written into the software: a few decades ago, the NASA computer measuring the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica rejected the incoming data because it was so much more extreme than the parameters that had been established. There’s a happy medium, as anyone who’s convinced a child that there is not actually a monster under the bed knows, and also sometimes there are monsters under the bed. Or seventy-foot waves coming at you. Climate change is one long assault on what we think of as predictable, or rather our expectation that the future will be like the recent past. It won’t.

A friend circulated the New York Times “presidential forecast” from October 18, 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a 91 percent chance of winning. Part of what made me tense with horror all through the month before that election was how many people thought 91 percent was as good as 100 percent. A lot of people confident she was going to win anyway stayed home or moved right on to fighting her as though she had already. It was as though one bullet in the cylinder was pretty much the same as no bullets. I hang out with doctors and I’ve had a medical adventure or two, so I know that a 9 percent chance of contracting something is taken seriously in the medical world. The US was in a high risk group that season, high risk of contracting Trump.

The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism. Optimism is confidence that you know the future and it requires nothing of you. It’s a mirror image of pessimism, which likewise assumes it knows the future, only pessimism’s future is dismal and not up to us either. Hope is a sense of possibility within the uncertainty of a future that does not yet exist, but that we are making by our actions (and yeah, those we loathe and oppose are making by theirs: case study, the ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination and all that voter suppression).

Hope is a sense of possibility within the uncertainty of a future that does not yet exist, but that we are making by our actions.The future needs us. It needs us in the present to choose through powerful action the best version, rather than allowing the worst to overtake us. We act as though the future is predictable, as though it travels in easily measured increments that don’t startle us, as though all the swans that fly across our sky are white. But black swans happen. Which is why I’ve modified the slogan, hope for the best, prepare for the worst to: Hope and work for the best (and also be prepared to wrestle with the worst if it arises). You have to believe in the worst to diminish its chances of coming to pass. Maybe this time around we believe it because to some degree we’ve lived it.

[this essay from which these paragraphs were taken originally written just before the 2020 election for Lithub.com]

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