The custodians of the English language have officially lowered the velvet rope and invited the barbarians—and their chatbots—into the inner sanctum. As 2025 gasps its final breaths, the world’s premier dictionaries have released their 'Words of the Year,' and the results are less 'literary excellence' and more 'digital hospice care.' We have moved past the era of Shakespearean sonnets and into the era of 'AI Slop,' a term Macquarie Dictionary chose to honor the massive piles of automated garbage currently suffocating our inboxes and our souls.

Not to be outdone in the race toward the cultural abyss, Oxford University Press has crowned 'Rage Bait' as its champion. Apparently, the most prestigious academic institution in the world spent twelve months analyzing our collective tendency to scream at strangers over flickering headlights and poorly cooked pasta. It is a bold move for a dictionary to admit that its primary function now is to provide a glossary for the various ways we choose to be miserable to one another for engagement metrics.

Meanwhile, the tech-obsessed gentry at Collins have embraced 'Vibe Coding.' This is the linguistic equivalent of a pilot deciding to 'vibe fly' a Boeing 747 by merely suggesting to the autopilot that the ground is a bad place to be. According to the 'Broligarchy'—another charming term from the Collins shortlist—you no longer need to understand the structural integrity of a computer program as long as you can whisper sweet nothings into a Large Language Model and hope the 'vibes' don't result in a systemic financial collapse.

“The dictionary has finally transitioned from a scholarly record of human achievement to a clinical autopsy of a dying language performed by people in powdered wigs.”

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But the true piece de resistance comes from Dictionary.com, which has simply given up on the concept of letters entirely. Their word of the year is '67.' Not sixty-seven, the integer, but 'six-seven,' a nonsensical numeric incantation derived from a rapper named Skrilla and a basketball player's height. It is a term that even the lexicographers admit is 'impossible to define' and carries 'all the hallmarks of brainrot.'

When the keepers of the word admit they are highlighting a number that means nothing as a placeholder for a civilization that has run out of things to say, you know we’ve reached the endgame. We are no longer 'aura farming' our way to relevance; we are simply drowning in the 'slop' and nodding along because, frankly, the vibes are just too exhausting to fight.

Disclaimer: This article is a satirical interpretation of linguistic trends and not a factual report. Inspired by the events and dictionaries described at https://time.com/7334730/word-of-the-year-2025-cambridge-collins-dictionary-oxford-merriam/.