Collins reveals 2025 Word of the Year, do you recognise it?

Collins Dictionary has announced its 2025 Word of the Year, spotlighting a term that captures the mood, habits, and debates of the past 12 months. The selection reflects rising usage across news, social media, and everyday conversation, with examples illustrating how meanings evolved. Collins also released a shortlist of runners-up that track major cultural, technological, and political shifts. Curious whether you’ve used it? Explore the meaning, origin, pronunciation, and why linguists say the word matters.

Last year’s language buzzword came straight from pop culture, Charli XCX helped propel “brat” into everyday chatter, and it ended up defining the vibe of 2024. This time around, the crown passes from the dancefloor to the developer’s desk. Collins has chosen “vibe coding” as its 2025 Word of the Year, a pick that neatly captures how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping not just the tools we use, but the very way we create software.

So what exactly does “vibe coding” mean? Imagine describing the app you want the way you’d brief a designer or explain a recipe to a friend, and then watching a machine translate your plain-English request into working code. That is the spirit of vibe coding. Instead of laboriously writing every loop and function, people are steering AI through intent: the desired outcome, the feel, the constraints, and the rules of the road. The machine handles the scaffolding, and you shape, refine, and review. It’s software development by conversation, where the “vibe” of what you want becomes the blueprint.

The phrase first surfaced in February from Andrej Karpathy, well known in AI circles for his roles at Tesla and OpenAI. He offered it as a shorthand for a new, human-centered programming flow, one where the emphasis moves away from syntax and toward specification. You tell the system what success looks like; it handles the heavy lifting of drafting the initial code, proposing alternatives, and iterating quickly when you change your mind. It’s like pair programming with a tireless collaborator who never gets bored of rewriting the same function eleven different ways.

Why would a dictionary care about a workflow from the coding world? Because words earn their place in the zeitgeist when they travel beyond their original niche. Collins’ lexicographers track these journeys using the Collins Corpus, a gigantic database of around 24 billion words pulled from journalism, books, broadcasts, blogs, and the controlled chaos of social media. When a term breaks out, appearing more often, in more places, with a consistent meaning, it gets noticed. “Vibe coding” has been doing just that, fueled by demos that feel like magic and headlines about AI copilots becoming everyday office companions.

The term’s rapid rise reflects a broader cultural pivot. For decades, programming lore told a story of mastery through painstaking detail: learn the syntax, memorize the libraries, conquer the compiler. The new narrative doesn’t discard that craft, it reframes it. Expertise increasingly looks like knowing how to express goals clearly, test assumptions, review AI output critically, and stitch together components with sound architecture. In other words, the craft moves up a level. You’re still responsible for quality and ethics, but you’re freed from some of the drudgery. That philosophical shift, humans specifying intent, machines proposing implementation, felt momentous enough to deserve a word, and now it has one.

Of course, “vibe coding” didn’t win by default. It edged out a lively shortlist of contenders that also painted a portrait of our times. One rival captured the spirit of experimentation in wellness and longevity. Often called DIY biology, “biohacking” refers to tinkering with diet, sleep, and sometimes more radical interventions in pursuit of sharper minds and longer lives. From glucose monitoring to cold plunges and stacks of supplements, this movement has grown from a subculture into something close to mainstream, complete with podcasts, forums, and a lexicon of its own. The term’s ubiquity made it a strong challenger.

Another term came from the evolving relationship young professionals have with work. “Micro-retirement” names a trend where people pause between jobs not out of failure, but intent, taking weeks or months to travel, study, build a side project, or simply recover, then reenter the workforce with a clearer head. It’s an antidote to burnout and a reimagining of a life arc that once placed all leisure at the end. In a world where skills expire quickly and values shift faster, short sabbaticals feel less like indulgence and more like maintenance.

Climate change also left its imprint on the shortlist. As heatwaves intensified, travelers began seeking out destinations where cool breezes still rule. The term “coolcation” sprang up to describe trips that prioritize milder climates and alpine shade over sweltering beaches. It’s both practical and symbolic: a recognition that the world’s thermostat has shifted, and our holiday habits are adapting in real time. Even travel marketing has begun to speak this language, spotlighting high-latitude cities, northern forests, and mountains in midsummer.

The modern office had its own coinage in the running. “Taskmasking” captures a familiar dance: looking busy rather than being productive. It’s the art of the open spreadsheet that hides a dozen unrelated tabs, the carefully scheduled “deep work” block that never gets deep, the stand-up update padded with jargon. Hybrid schedules and endless notifications make genuine focus harder to achieve, and taskmasking names the performance that sometimes replaces it. The term resonated because nearly everyone recognizes the tension between appearing industrious and doing the work that truly moves the needle.

Money talk rounded out the field with a label that’s been circulating in personal finance for years: “HENRY,” short for “high earner, not rich yet.” It describes professionals with solid salaries whose wealth hasn’t caught up, often due to student loans, urban living costs, or the catch-22 of saving while navigating life’s big expenses. The concept has sparked a cottage industry of advice, how to allocate windfalls, when to invest versus pay down debt, how to avoid lifestyle creep. As shorthand goes, it’s precise and a bit cheeky, which is probably why it stuck.

Each of these candidates felt plausible because it reflects a lived reality. Together, they sketch a world where well-being meets experimentation, work gets reorganized around energy rather than hours, travel responds to a warming planet, productivity struggles against distraction, and money means more than a monthly income number. Language captured all of that, and “vibe coding” took the trophy by pointing toward a near-future skill set we’re already practicing: the ability to articulate intent so clearly that a machine can help us build it.

There’s a poetic irony in a dictionary celebrating a term born in code. But the choice makes perfect sense. Great words compress complicated ideas into something you can pass around. “Vibe coding” is witty enough to spread, specific enough to be useful, and elastic enough to evolve. One team might say they’re vibe coding a prototype for a healthcare app. A teacher might describe a classroom experiment where students outline a game and let AI assemble the first draft. A designer could vibe code interface states while checking accessibility and brand tone. In every case, the human sets direction and standards; the system accelerates execution.

Will this way of working transform every corner of tech? Maybe not. Some projects will always demand meticulous, bespoke engineering. But the gravitational pull is unmistakable. More people will participate in building software when the entry barrier is storytelling rather than syntax. That democratization is thrilling and messy: thrilling because ideas can move faster from head to screen, messy because we must double down on review practices, security, and accountability. The Word of the Year doesn’t claim everything is solved. It signals what we’re all talking about as we try to solve it.

As the calendar turns, it’s fun to remember that last year’s “brat” taught us how a single word can carry a whole aesthetic-bold, irreverent, neon-smeared. This year’s winner does something similar for technology. It distills an emerging craft into a phrase that feels light yet serious, playful yet practical. Whether you’re an engineer, a creative, or simply curious about where work is headed, “vibe coding” is a reminder that the next big leap may come not from memorizing more commands, but from articulating your vision so well that a machine can meet you halfway.

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Source: newssky‍