Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) attended the first Acid Test organized by Ken Kesey (1935-2001) on 27 November 1965. At the Acid Test on 12 February 1966, Wavy Gravy (b. 1936) dubbed the punch "electric Kool-Aid", inspiring the title of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968), by Tom Wolfe (1930-2018). Kool-Aid
Language Matters | Amid new oil crisis, how the word ‘oil’ evolved from its food-based origins
As the Middle East conflict e…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #MediterraneanOliveOil #OliveOil #arabic #cantonese #english #Greek #hongkong #latin #mandarin #Mediterranean #MiddleEast #Oil #Olive #olivetree #OxfordEnglishDictionary #Sanskrit #Sinitic #southasian #thewordoil
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2557326/language-matters-amid-new-oil-crisis-how-the-word-oil-evolved-from-its-food-based-origins/
English words of the year 2025
Welcome to the fifth consecutive words-of-the-year post — my way of saying goodbye to the previous year here on the blog.
Before we take a look at the words chosen by the leading lexicographers from the English-speaking world, can you think of any words that had a special significance for you in 2025, either English or from other languages? I’d love to hear about them, so please do post a comment below the post!
It’s only fair to share mine: mayhap. It was on New Year’s Eve that I finished reading Anne Brontë’s fabulous 1848 novel “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And among all sorts of dated words I encountered there, mayhap has stuck with me as one I’d love to see used again.
Mayhap simply means ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’. It was formed by combining the modal verb may and the lovely archaic noun hap — ‘chance’, ‘fortune’.
Now, from my retro perspective on to the more forward-looking dictionaries of contemporary English!
Collins | VIBE CODING
Starting with the Collins Dictionary, their Word of the Year 2025 was vibe coding, defined as follows: “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” The publisher credited Andrej Karpathy, the founding engineer at OpenAI, for popularising the term, using it to describe “how AI enables creative output while he could forget that the code even exists.”
If you don’t care much for AI and the related terminology, you might like some of their shortlisted words more:
Dictionary.com | 67
You’ve probably expected this one, as six-seven was one of biggest and most absurd global social phenomena of 2025. Defined by Dictionary.com as ultimately undefinable, meaningless, and nonsensical, “67” is interpreted as typical brainrot (which, incidentally, was one of Dictionary.com’s shortlisted WOTY 2024).
Among the shortlisted words are aura farming, broligarchy, and clanker, that we’ve already seen; and here are the other ones — not all of which are actual words, mind you:
Merriam-Webster | SLOP
Editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary chose slop as the Word of the Year 2025. While the word isn’t new (it’s a synonym for rubbish, among other things), the particular use that drew their attention happens to be connected with AI, namely: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” I loved this part of the explanation: “Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was ‘soft mud.’ In the 1800s it came to mean ‘food waste‘ (as in ‘pig slop’), and then more generally, ‘rubbish’ or ‘a product of little or no value.’”
And here are the shortlisted words; you’ll be able to recognise social and political events lurking behind them:
Oxford English Dictionary | RAGE BAIT
Chosen by 30.000 voters, the OED Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait, defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.”
The other two shortlisted words, shared by some of the other publishers, were aura farming and biohacking.
To read my previous WOTY posts or to get more detailed information on the WOTY 2025 chosen by the publishers listed above, click on the links in the Additional Resources section below.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
English words of the year 2021
English years of the year 2022
English words of the year 2023
English words of the year 2024
The Collins Word of the Year 2025
Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year 2025
Merriam-Webster 2025 Word of the Year
NOTES
I’m a freelance language tutor (English, Latin, Classical Greek), researcher, and a literary scholar currently based in Belgrade, Serbia.
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#AmericanEnglish #BritishEnglish #Collins #dictionaries #English #EnglishLanguage #EnglishVocabulary #learningEnglish #MerriamWebster #OxfordEnglishDictionary #words #WOTY
I am expecting great things from @bytebro here, who no doubt spotted "southbridge" (one of the chips in a PC mainboard chipset) in yesterday's list.
"filesystem" is already ticked off, too.
And "mainboard" doesn't quite cut the mustard because even though #MerriamWebster does not have it, the #OxfordEnglishDictionary does.
Many computing terms are surprisingly a lot older than the 1970s and early 1980s.
But neither on-line dictionary has (for example) "elsethread", which no doubt @bytebro regards, as the rest of us used to 4 decades of threaded discussions do, as a normal word of long standing.
A relative is proud of xyr purchase of an early 1970s Concise #OxfordEnglishDictionary. I keep thinking of the huge number of everyday words and phrases, for me, that it cannot have. Looking up the movie #BossLevel (that the TiVo just thought that I should see), for example, the meaning of a "boss" as a video game enemy cannot pre-date the original 1971 Bruce Lee movie that the concept came from. "smartphone", "binfluencer", "mickeys", "rickrolling", "Wi-Fi", "cellphone", "floppy disc", "GUI", "TUI", "upvote", "newsgroup", "e-mail", "Thatcherite", "Lib Dem", "Blairite", "house music", "hard-code", "transgender", "JIT", "photoshop", "anime", "side-scroller", "teletext", "internet", "Ethernet", "DoS", "malware", "spammer", "SCSI", "southbridge", "CD", "chip and PIN", "shareware", "weblog", "cyberspace", "kill file", "MCP", "Bushism", "terminal emulator", "PDF", "K-pop", "PDA", "SUV", "boom box", "phishing", "infotainment", "GPS", "website", "coprocessor", … #EnglishLanguage
A poor substitute for a @lindasgoluppiart task.
Following on from yesterday's task and accompanying dictionary surprise:
For 10 minutes, attempt to identify any other 45-year-old (or roughly similarly aged) words that you yourself have been using for decades, that the current on-line #OxfordEnglishDictionary and #MerriamWebster do not have; beyond "filesystem".
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/115570125326606491
https://oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=filesystem
Today's dictionary surprise: Neither the on-line #OxfordEnglishDictionary nor on-line #MerriamWebster have "filesystem", although the on-line Cambridge Dictionaries has. This despite it being a single word since at least 1981. (It's in Richard Gauthier's book on Unix, pre-dating its use in Bourne's book by 2 years.) And despite it being a 2 word phrase in the 1970s (with this specific computer meaning) before that. https://archive.org/details/Using_The_UNIX_System_Richard_Gauthier/page/263/mode/2up?q=filesystem #Unix #EnglishLanguage #lexicography
Today's dictionary surprise:
Neither the on-line #OxfordEnglishDictionary nor on-line #MerriamWebster have "filesystem", although the on-line Cambridge Dictionaries has.
This despite it being a single word since at least 1981. (It's in Richard Gauthier's book on Unix, pre-dating its use in Bourne's book by 2 years.) And despite it being a 2 word phrase in the 1970s (with this specific computer meaning) before that.
https://archive.org/details/Using_The_UNIX_System_Richard_Gauthier/page/263/mode/2up?q=filesystem
A poor substitute for a @lindasgoluppiart task.
Today, for no more than 1 minute:
Try to find at least 3 of the 4 words in the aforegiven list that actually did not turn up when I searched the on-line #OxfordEnglishDictionary.
For extra points, find the 1 of those 4 that even #Wiktionary does not have, despite #SusieDent having mentioned it in 2023.
A relative is proud of xyr purchase of an early 1970s Concise #OxfordEnglishDictionary.
I keep thinking of the huge number of everyday words and phrases, for me, that it cannot have.
Looking up the movie #BossLevel (that the TiVo just thought that I should see), for example, the meaning of a "boss" as a video game enemy cannot pre-date the original 1971 Bruce Lee movie that the concept came from.
"smartphone", "binfluencer", "mickeys", "rickrolling", "Wi-Fi", "cellphone", "floppy disc", "GUI", "TUI", "upvote", "newsgroup", "e-mail", "Thatcherite", "Lib Dem", "Blairite", "house music", "hard-code", "transgender", "JIT", "photoshop", "anime", "side-scroller", "teletext", "internet", "Ethernet", "DoS", "malware", "spammer", "SCSI", "southbridge", "CD", "chip and PIN", "shareware", "weblog", "cyberspace", "kill file", "MCP", "Bushism", "terminal emulator", "PDF", "K-pop", "PDA", "SUV", "boom box", "phishing", "infotainment", "GPS", "website", "coprocessor", …
Liam O'Mara IV, PhD
Andrew Shields
Dining and Cooking
grammaticus
JdeBP
JdeBP