1043. "Skibidi," "polarization," "brat," "demure," "enshittification," and more. You might get whiplash from the vacillating vibes of all the words the dictionaries chose this year. I joined John Kelly, former vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com, to romp through all the choices and contenders.
1043. "Skibidi," "polarization," "brat," "demure," "enshittification," and more. You might get whiplash from the vacillating vibes of all the words the dictionaries chose this year. I joined John Kelly, former vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com, to romp through all the choices and contenders.
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here today with John Kelly, formerly from Dictionary.com, previously the vice president of editorial, and was in charge of the word-of-the-year decisions there.
And so we are going to talk all about words of the year for 2024. John Kelly, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
JOHN: Thank you so much for having me back. And I'm so happy to talk about everyone's favorite compound plural: "words of the year."
MIGNON: I know. I know. It's such a fun time of year to have all these wordy discussions. Can you tell us, so one really interesting comment I got from a follower, I think it was on Threads, who said, "I can't believe the dictionaries can never agree on what the word of the year is." And I thought, I think they try to each be different. So, can you talk in general about how these words get chosen?
JOHN: That is a great observation from one of your users. Dictionaries, in general, follow a similar pattern. They look for four criteria to make their selection of word of the year. Lookup data. What words were looked up in some significantly larger way over the course of the past year? Cultural trends. This one absolutely matters.
Does the word reflect major events defined that year? We're talking about the past year, after all. Lexical trends: was the word, is the word lexically or word-wise interesting in some way? Is there something about that word that reveals what's happening in language?
And finally, resonance. Does it land with the user? Can they sit back and go, "Oh, yeah. That really was 2024"? Some years there is overlap. In 2020, Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both chose "pandemic." How could you not? Other years? That was the year, and other dictionaries reflected similar words. In prior years, some of the dictionaries, especially British and Australian ones, they aligned on climate-related words. In general, dictionaries get different data, so different lookup data surfaces. And, of course, dictionaries do want love in this world, and it can be important for them to make sure that there is a choice that stands out against their beloved collegial competitor.
MIGNON: So why are dictionaries getting different data?
JOHN: That is a fascinating question that I haven't received before. There could be different users. So different people have their different preferred dictionary. Some users for one dictionary might represent a far more international audience, and other users might represent a far more national audience.
But that is a tricky one. We can't go into the heads of all the users, but it often comes down to people's preferences, people's geography, and things like that. And things of that nature.
MIGNON: Yeah. I can't tell you how much I would love to have access to that data. It must be fascinating. What was it like to dig into that?
JOHN: You really do see a fascinating, sometimes bizarre, to put it nicely, cross-section into what people do on dictionaries. And sometimes the words that top lists, especially in dictionaries, aren't necessarily the sexiest words or the most glamorous words. You find things like “the” and “uh.” And you really see a lot of human behavior when you get into the thesaurus data.
Thesaurus data, year after year, tends to have a very stable set of 50 or so words that people look up over and over and over again, and those are words like "important" or those are words like "beautiful," and that shows that we are all writers, and we are all trying to reach for other words. So there's even differences in the data between the dictionary and the thesaurus, just like that.
MIGNON: I already … I'm writing a blog post, and I already said this lake and the bird and the tree are beautiful. I need another word.
JOHN: Yes. I find myself using the thesaurus all the time, and it's on those words that show that, that affect, that concern value or words of degree, right? We're often looking for "great," or "very," or things like that. And it's pretty much the same set over and over again.
MIGNON: True. Yeah. And it's a really good point. People search our website for "'a' versus 'an'" all the time. The simple words can be confusing, but I'm getting off track. So "the," obviously, would never be the word of the year. And we were here to talk about words of the year. But it sounded like you were saying words, even if they were searched, people search for them a lot. And even if it maybe had shown an increase, that isn't the only thing. That might not be a word of the year. Do you have any examples of words that maybe in the past had been searched for a lot but didn't make the cut because they weren't interesting?
JOHN: That's a great question. We can look to certain times of the year, like holidays, where words recur over and over again. "Love" during Valentine's Day, back-to-school season; you will see a lot of big abstract nouns pop, like "history," "culture," or "science." You can almost see the teacher's assignment: In our first session of class, I want you to provide me a definition of what you think culture is in say, sociology 101. During Halloween and Christmas times, you see similar seasonal words, and there are other examples to other vocabulary items, but those have a seasonality that, because of their seasonality, we know isn't necessarily reflecting what makes, say, 2024, 2024.
So dictionaries take this big set of data, and they use, you know, they identify all the recurring lookups and a lot of other noise, sometimes some bad words that people like to look up. And then we slice the data in a way where you're looking for often a percent increase, so compared to last year, or compared to year over year, or compared to last month.
Does this word have a significantly larger lookup volume than before? And then that becomes a measure for how we think this word reflects the interests and concerns of a user over the past year.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. And you reminded me, we're going to get into the words now. And I know some of our listeners, you listen with your kids in the car, and we are going to have a few, like, mild swear words in this episode. So prepare yourself or tune out if you don't think it's going to be appropriate for your kids.
It's nothing dramatic. So, John, what were some of the themes in this year's word-of-the-year choices?
JOHN: The themes this year are a lot of the themes we've seen in the past few years: pop culture words, politics, and the impacts of digital technology. Pop culture this year, and the pop culture selections this year such as "brat," "manifest," and "demure," which we'll get to.
I want to highlight that these show how influencers, social media influencers, especially younger women, are driving interest in language, are driving language trends, and are even showing up as words of the year.
Politics for dictionaries is a tricky one too. A lot of users really want a dictionary to be a mirror for how they feel. And we absolutely get that. However, dictionaries do strive to be objective. And the data also shows that people aren't necessarily looking up a lot of those words that we might feel should be word of the year. And that's why sometimes it can look like dictionaries are dancing around.
And finally, the impacts of technology. It should surprise nobody that our turmoil of technological change from social media to AI is impacting what we see in the data and what we see in the discourse.
MIGNON: Yeah, last year, Dictionary.com's word was "hallucinate," and related to AI, and last … there were a big theme last year was AI-type words.
JOHN: That's correct. A lot of dictionaries chose AI-related words, and at Dictionary.com, we chose "hallucinate" not only because it dealt with AI, but it showed interesting things about the language of AI. We're taking this one word from one domain, psychology, and we're applying it in whole new novel ways to another.
So that calls back to some of those criteria for great word-of-the-year selections. It's about culture, AI, but it's also about language. How does this word reflect what we're doing with the language? And that's why Collins landed on "hallucinate." That's why Dictionary.com landed on "hallucinate."
Merriam-Webster last year chose "authentic," and that is really about our relationship with AI. What is real? What is not? Who am I? And, not? And we'll see some more AI candidates or not, candidates, winners as we go here.
MIGNON: Yeah, I think the biggest AI-related word this year was probably "brain rot," picked by Oxford.
JOHN: "Brain rot." Yes. So Oxford had a short list of terms, and they let their users vote on them, which is a fun way of getting people involved. And a number of other dictionaries do that, and "brain rot" surfaced as its winner. So what is brain rot? You can imagine it—it's a rotten brain. Okay. But here's some interesting things about it.
"Brain rot" is actually older than you think. We can find it back in the 1850s, from Thoreau. So that's a fun fact. Sometimes, new language is a lot older than you imagine, but what does it mean? I love that too. And we'll see that in some other selections too, but what is brain rot?
Brain rot is low-quality digital content, and the supposed mental deterioration that consuming a lot of it is supposed to do. So "brain rot" definitely popped off this year. It was on a lot of other dictionary shortlists. Oxford chose it, and it was on the shortlist for at least two others, I believe.
And it really had a moment this year, but there's a few interesting things to me about it. Brain rot language really had a moment this year, and brain rot language is— all right, kids in the cars or close your ears. Parents, maybe you don't want to hear this—but it is those words that you heard ad nauseam this year.
"Skibbity." "Rizz." "Sigma." "Fanum tax." This became described as brain rot language and the idea of it is young people were just using it, well, ad nauseam and a lot of thought pieces were generated about what's going on with young kids in their language. And there was a lot of other articles on, is the internet destroying young people's brains?
And there's a lot of value in that. But when you look at how people are using the word "brain rot," which I did to some degree earlier this year, it's mostly used humorously or ironically or playfully. So somebody might go, "Oh my goodness, there's a new season of Bridgerton. This is my brain rot." And what do they mean by that?
They mean they're really going to get into it. They're really going to get into it. So sometimes Gen Z slang or Gen Alpha slang or whatever you might want to call it, it might seem a little bit scary or unfamiliar, but really what's happening there is it's young people playing around with language, and sometimes they're playing around with language to mess with adults.
So the kids are all right. So "brain rot" does refer to that, fear around really bad digital content, making you stupider. But people who actually are using "brain rot" are just using it for vegging out content that they want to consume a lot of.
MIGNON: Yeah, about six months ago on Facebook, I asked people for a half-yearly check in what they thought the word of the year should be. And a lot of people who had tweens as kids said "skibidi," that they were hearing “skibidi,” "skibidi toilet," "skibidi Ohio" from their kids nonstop. They were like, this is the word of the year, but they were also saying," I hate it".
JOHN: Enough, enough, I think that means the kids succeeded.
MIGNON: . Yeah, so "demure" is from a TikTok from Jools Lebron, who was doing a video showing how she was getting dressed to go to work and was wearing like modest clothes and makeup that isn't over the top. And she would say, she said, "Demure, very mindful."
And "demure" just took off when, again, one of my followers said it's as if no one had ever heard this word before she said it.
JOHN: It was an incredible moment. Let's hear it for Jools Lebron for boosting all of our vocabularies. I love this story so much because it was an everyday creator, Jools Lebron, being herself and using a really great vocabulary word, "demure," which means muted or restrained, and then playing around with it and sort of changing the world for a few weeks. This also shows another trend that we see this year with words of the year, where it's not like out of the sky a whole new word drops and we're suddenly using it. We're taking old vocabulary words like "demure," which has been around for centuries and using them in some new ways.
"Demure" by Jools Lebron, as well as "mindful," did imply restraint and tastefulness, but what's really interesting about it to me is it had a little pizazz to it, so it's not exactly being perfectly quiet and proper; it's being tasteful, it's being stylish, it's being sophisticated in a way that is restrained, but ironically self-confident.
And self-confidence is a theme that we see in a number of other words, such as "manifest" from Cambridge and "brat" from Collins. What was your reaction to "brat" from Collins?
MIGNON: The same way I felt about "demure." It felt to me like it was—it had its moment, but then it was a flash in the pan, and I feel like it went away. "Brat" comes from Charlie XCX, a musician; her album "Brat," which is bright green, is like Granny Smith apple green.
So it was also that color had a moment and everything was Brat Summer, but I don't feel like I've heard it in months. And I feel the same way about "demure." I made a "very demure, very mindful" joke around the time it was out, and it was maybe a week after it had hit. And I felt like I was late with my joke a week later, so I think that's an interesting thing that dictionaries do: picking these words that feel like a flash in the pan to me.
JOHN: Why the word of the year can be a really hard plane to land. "Brat" and "demure" definitely defined our year, and they defined our year as words too, but they were definitely of the moment.
MIGNON: Do you feel like they're at odds with each other? They're kind of opposites.
JOHN: In some ways, yes, but I think when you dig a little bit deeper, I think actually not. "Brat" to me is rebelliously self-confident, really putting yourself out there and not being as concerned with other people's opinions. "Demure" on the surface would seem to be the opposite. In some ways, it is.
It's dressing tastefully. It's applying your makeup tastefully and things like that, but at the same time, it's a social media trend that's going viral and it's about self-presentation. So there's a bit of swagger to it. So "brat" and "demure" to me, while opposites, are also closely allied in this theme of young women on social media taking pride in who they are and expressing themselves. And that's why I think in some ways they have a lot in common. And while the individual words may feel less resonant for the scope of the entire year, I do think that they reflect an ongoing trend of what's happening on social media and who is driving it: young women and how through content creation.
So in that respect, they're a little bit less of a flash in the pan.
MIGNON: Yeah. And who do you think is more likely to manifest? Someone who is brat or demure?
JOHN: Whoa, whoa. I think Jools Lebron certainly manifested a lot of success for herself. And I think Charlie XCX certainly manifested a lot for herself too. But I think "manifest," which Cambridge chose as a social media trend too, and "manifest" here doesn't just mean clear or plain. It means visualizing your success, and it comes from some pop psychology.
This underscores that pattern I was talking about, about younger women driving change on social media. Cambridge Dictionary in England cites the Olympics when Simone Biles and others were talking about manifesting their gold medals. I think they did it by skill, not through any mental gymnastics, but by talent, hard work, and charisma.
And Cambridge also cited other artists like Dua Lipa, and I believe maybe Sabrina Carpenter or Charlie XCX joining Taylor Swift. So you have this whole moment of this sort of manifested success. I would say, though, "brat" seems to want it a little bit more, but "demure" has patience in the long game where that follow-through is going to happen.
MIGNON: Take some time to manifest.
JOHN: It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight.
MIGNON: It's interesting because that's another one that didn't feel particularly new to me because people were talking about this kind of manifesting going all the way back to the book "The Secret." And I think that was the nineties, but it seems like the new generation has rediscovered this pop culture idea. Â
JOHN: The word, yeah, the word is not new at all. This one wasn't on my radar as much, so this one surprised me a little bit, but I took great pleasure in digging into Cambridge's explanation for why, and I felt like it made a lot of sense for them, and they saw massive amounts of lookups on their site.
It had a really big moment. You asked before why do some dictionaries see different lookups than others? For some reason, in Cambridge, users in the UK and probably other Commonwealth countries were really into "manifest." So it gives us a little bit of a different window on people's preoccupations around the world.
MIGNON: I wonder if that's because the Olympics was more in their time zone this time around, and "manifest" was seemingly tied to the Olympics and its boost in popularity, at least a little bit.
JOHN: Oh, that's interesting. I had the word of the year exercises are fascinating because it will sometimes remind you of what happened in the past year. And I'm going, all right, the Olympics happened. I know that. John, where was it? Where was it? I was in France. Okay. And then, moving over to Merriam-Webster, on their shortlist was "totality" from the eclipse.
When I saw that, I went, oh yeah.
MIGNON: So did I! Oh, there was an eclipse!
JOHN: I forgot about that because of the second half of the year and its many events.
MIGNON: Yeah. Do you feel like there's a recency bias with the words of the year?
JOHN: I think there's absolutely a recency bias, especially because it falls in the announcements start happening in November and in the United States, where there was all where I think word of the year also biases election business typically falls in November, and the election stuff is very important.
It's very top of our mind, and the language of politics is more prominent than ever before, but I definitely think there's that recency bias there.
MIGNON: Yeah. Let's move on. There were definitely another big theme in the words of the year that were politics-related. Let's talk about some of those.Â
JOHN: Yes. So I mentioned Merriam-Webster before, and it had totality on its short list. Its winner was "polarization," and I don't probably have to spell out exactly why Merriam-Webster chose "polarization," but what can we say about it? If people aren't going to the dictionary per se, or at least, the data that I've seen in my experience, the dictionaries hasn't borne this out.
They're not going to pointedly look up emotionally political words all the time. They are looking up big, important words like "fascism" or "democracy," and in these moments of change, challenge, and crisis, there is something about that dictionary as an objective arbiter that people still rely on to get more information, maybe to feel some security in having a definition.
Maybe they're doing it to be more accurate or factual in their own discourse and debate. But Merriam-Webster landed on "polarization" for its word of the year. And also on its list were a number of other political words, such as "pander," "cognitive," and "democracy." "Democracy" is one of those words that we do see a lot of lookups year after year, but it especially spikes during presidential elections.
MIGNON: Yeah. And then, The Economist, so not a dictionary, but a big magazine, a British magazine, chose a word that I find difficult. I bet a lot of people would look this up after they heard it. And it was "kaki..."
JOHN: You almost had it. You can do it. It's a tough word.
MIGNON: "Kaki..." "Kaki..." "Kakistocracy."
JOHN: "Kakistocracy."
MIGNON: And I'd heard it's a weird English word.
JOHN: It's a very strange word. It means government by the worst. And it is a coinage, as far as I know. And it combines this Greek word, "kakistos," and that means the worst, and it uses "ocracy," meaning, rule by or government of such as "democracy" or "theocracy" or many other words. And this word popped off, as you can imagine, around the time of the election and afterwards as a way to characterize how a lot of people felt what was happening to the US government.
But it's a very striking word because it's long. Because it's got those two Ks. It makes you wonder how to pronounce it. And it has this other element that is fascinating: Oh, there is a word for that.
MIGNON: Yeah. And there aren't, my understanding is there are hardly any other English words that come from that root. And that, here's the warning for the parents. It comes from like "caca," to defecate. Like, that's the same root.
JOHN: It's thought to be related to "caca," meaning to defecate. And I can't think of any other English words that use "kakistos." It is believed to be a coinage, and it's typically pretty rare. So if you don't know this word, you're not really supposed to know this word. It's a little bit, it's a little bit esoteric, but it has these moments, and the word gives a lot of people expression to something that they're feeling around politics. And it's also just a fascinating word as such.
MIGNON: Yeah. And then that brings us to another one that's similar is "enshittification."
JOHN: You also nailed that one. That's got a lot of syllables too. "Enshittification." This word comes from the choice of this word as word of the year comes from down under. So one of the major dictionaries in Australia, the Macquarie Dictionary, chose "enshittification." What is "enshittification"? Let me use an example.
Have you ever used an app or a website or something like that in digital technology? And for a long time, it works as you want it. But then over time you see all these new features and then you've got to click on more stuff and maybe there's more ads. When that happens, originally technologists or people who sort of study technology and business and culture started to refer to this as enshittifying the app.
And the idea is. The experience of the app or the software or whatever is going worse out of a profit motive. Meaning whoever owns it has a push or a drive to try to make more and more money, and the experience of the website gets worse. This word was popularized by a man named Cory Doctorow.Â
I believe he's a tech journalist, although he wasn't the very first one to ever coin it. There's evidence for it back in the early 2010s. And this is a cool thing about language, which is, sometimes a person will be really influential in making a word spread. But it doesn't mean that they are single-handedly the coiner of the word.
We're all creative in our own little spheres and bubbles everywhere. But sometimes a person like a Cory Doctorow makes it spread. What else is interesting about "enshittification" is the word is showing that it has some legs. It has some staying power. So originally it referred to technology getting worse due to capitalistic motives, and American Dialect Society, who's doing its word of the year vote sometime after our wonderful chat here, it chose it as that word last year. And now, the Macquarie Dictionary is choosing it. Does that mean that the Macquarie Dictionary is behind the times? No, not necessarily. It means that word is increasingly prominent, and we're starting to see enshittification and all of its other forms being used for other experiences.
So people might start talking about life being enshittified versus just a website that they like being enshittified. And that is a very common pattern in language where a word from one area expands and spreads to name a broader set of concepts. And that's probably one of the reasons why that Australian dictionary chose it as its word of the year.
MIGNON: Yeah, one thing I think is funny about that word is it feels like it's trying to sound pompous. It's got prefixes and suffixes, but in the middle, you have this, offensive word.
JOHN: In the middle is a pile of you have it, and around it are all those affixes and prefixes that feel very Latin-y, that make it feel very official and scientific. That's exactly what is going on in that word. English words that are heavily drawn from Latin and Greek, and that have all those prefixes and affixes, are often very academic in nature.
That is not by accident in the word "enshittification."
MIGNON: and so there aren't just the winners either. A lot of the dictionaries have runners-up or honorable mentions that can be really interesting, and they also have some themes.
JOHN: Look, dictionaries want all of the words. So, word of the year, you gotta have a short list. You gotta have a short list, especially because our experience of the year is so manifold and so diverse. How can you pin down what it's like to be alive in 2024 in one word? So, on the short list, we see a lot of other themes. Prominent among them are technology.
And yes, artificial intelligence again. Oxford, over in the UK, Oxford University Press had on its short list "slop." What is slop in everyday life to you?
MIGNON: Oh, it's what you feed the pigs.
JOHN: Now that's what comes out of, in many people's perspectives, that's what is coming out of things like ChatGPT and other forms of AI.
MIGNON: That is what is enshittifying Google search.
JOHN: That is enshittifying Google search. And young people, parents, everybody, fact-check your A.I. It will not give you accurate information. Scroll down and click through to your dictionaries to give them some traffic to keep them alive.
Anyways, slop. Slop, yes, it's what you give pigs to eat. So it's a pejorative term, and it's another example of an existing word from one area that is being reapplied into new contexts. So, "slop" was repurposed to name images, videos, articles in writing that has been produced by AI based on prompts, but the quality is pretty ... pretty poor.
And "slop" is somewhat similar to kind of "brain rot" in that it has that digitally produced, low-quality aspect. Now...
MIGNON: The flip side on AI is also one of the shortlisted words was "resonate," which studies—I think studies have shown that—"delve" and some other words show up a lot in AI-generated text.
JOHN: This is so fascinating. So, "resonate," which was on Merriam-Webster's shortlist, is a word about our words. So this is so neat to me. The models, the large language models are seeing across massive amounts of text that it—this is in air quotes here—it thinks that human writing really likes particular kinds of words.
And it's probably pretty true because we're all taught to write in certain ways. And one of them is "resonate." So apparently, "resonate" is a word that AI uses a lot in everyday writing. And you also cited “delve”... I recently came across some interesting chatter about punctuation too, where some people are saying a piece of writing that has too many em dashes—like the very long hyphen, one of my favorites—around which there should be no spaces.
So, close it up a little style guide aside there...
MIGNON: Oh, I like spaces.
JOHN: You like the spaces around the em dash?
MIGNON: I do.
JOHN: Oh, I like them close. I used to like the spaces around them. Yeah, we all have these strange ticks with our punctuation, and that's what makes life interesting. But "resonate" is one of those words that is a telltale sign that something might have been written by AI.
But of course, we do need to take a lot of that with a grain of salt.
MIGNON: Yeah, I think that's a lie. I use a lot of em dashes.
JOHN: Yes, the em dash one is absolutely a lie because em dashes are probably my favorite punctuation mark.
MIGNON: Yeah, I think it probably just trained on our writing.
JOHN: It's it. It's, that's why they're brilliant.
MIGNON: And, how about, there's some, there were some more fun pop culture words this year.
JOHN: Yeah. There are some other fun pop culture words that actually might show a backlash to technology. One of them is "romantasy." This is a blend word, and English loves a blend word. Everybody loves a blend word. A blend word, more fancifully, is sometimes called a portmanteau. A lot of new words in language, especially English, are created by smushing two words together.
"Breakfast," "lunch," "brunch." We've been doing it forever. "Romantic" is actually from German publishing, I believe, and it has spread all over English and other languages through TikTok due to the massive popularity of this genre. What is that genre? It is romance and fantasy. So my wife right now, she is thick in the romantasy because she's reading, reading, reading through all the Sarah J. Maas books…
MIGNON: Yeah, I just started those, actually.
JOHN: And she can't get enough of them. And now we have this wonderful word, “romantasy,” to refer to the genre. It's very popular on something called BookTok. Have you heard of BookTok?
MIGNON: Yeah, how can you not?
JOHN: So we all have a lot of feelings on technology, but there's a wonderful corner of the internet where influencers are influencing about books. Right now, this particular genre of really well world-built fantastical with a touch of love and romance is very popular.
MIGNON: A lot of, that's a lot of young women again, isn't it?
JOHN: BookTok is absolutely a lot of young women as well. Women drive trends both in culture and in language. "Romantacy" is but another example connected to it is "lore," as in "folklore." This was on Oxford's shortlist, so it was "romantasy" among others. "Lore" is the set of supposed facts and beliefs and other information that make a character. So if you're really into superhero stuff and you know all about Spider-Man's great, great, great-grandfather, whatever it is, you are up on its lore. This is part of being part of a fandom, and fandoms right now are really big online. But an interesting thing that's happening to "lore" is people are using it to refer to their own lives.
So my lore might involve early jobs I had, cities I lived in, my favorite punctuation mark, like em dashes. So if you're up on John's lore, you might know that. And what's fun about "lore," along with a word like "era" vis a vis Taylor Swift, is we're using these narrative metaphors for our life, and there's something about the storytelling-ness of it that suggests a kind of an agency or an immersion to something else that at very, that at least breaks up our sort of screen-mediated existence.
And at worst might suggest a kind of escape isn't from the stresses of the story. The stresses of being alive these days.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's great. We're going to wrap up with our personal choices for word of the year. I think a lot of people look at the words and think, how could they have missed this word? This is what I think should be the word, or this was my favorite word. And then we're going to, we're going to have some aspirational words too because we could look ahead…
JOHN: Oh, I love it.
MIGNON: Yeah. And then in the bonus segment, we're going to talk about words chosen by organizations outside the U.S. — those are also really interesting. But I'll say some, my word that I thought, how could they, how could this not have been on more lists? The Economist did mention it really briefly, but "vibe" to me … I heard "vibe" nonstop this year.
The vibes are off. The vibes have changed.Â
JOHN: Hmm.Â
MIGNON: There was even an Instagram influencer who is suing another woman because she stole her vibe. It's, to me, "vibe" was everywhere. That's my word of the year.
JOHN: Yeah, maybe it was so everywhere that it was like wallpaper, and it was hard to notice, but I noticed it too. "Vibes" was a catch-all explanation. So I remember in the summertime, and this is about politics again, but I remember listening to analysis of a lot of the events that were going on, and journalists, left and right, were explaining everything through vibes.
It's the vibes election, and what's going on there? There's something going on with "vibes." It's not just about the energy that we give off or the atmosphere or something. That's the, that's where that word comes from. And of course, back in the sixties, if you put the Beach Boys on, you'd be listening to"Good Vibrations."
So the concept is new, but it's having this new place, maybe a little bit like “thing,” “that's a thing,” that it's serving as a placeholder for all of us to lean on when we're having a hard time pinpointing exactly what is going on, and it definitely popped up. I was having a conversation with another dictionary maker, and we were talking about "vibes," and I said, there's a nuance here, and I would not envy the lexicographer whose job it is to exactly pinpoint what's going on with vibes in this ironic way, because "vibes" is a stand-in for kind of any old feeling that something gives off.
MIGNON: Yeah. Okay. And what's your word?
JOHN: Okay. I actually have two, sorry, everybody. It's a little bit of a cop-out, but there are two different categories. So the first is my choice of word of the year as a word. And we've actually mentioned it, and it's "skibidi."
MIGNON: Ah.
JOHN: "Skibidi"was definitely a trend late in 2023, early 2024, but I'm fascinated by this because it's part of this larger trend of internet nonsense lingo.
So you have all these parents, teachers, or writers saying, what are the young people saying when they mean "skibidi"? They're not really saying anything at all. It's in-group language. It's playing around. It's goofing off. It's pestering adults and things like that. And there were a lot of words like this that trended late last year and really heavily early into this year.
And that includes Ohio, which references a meme. It includes some gaming streaming language, like "fanum tax." It includes "rizz." It includes "sigma," and it's this meme-meta language that I think just shows a really fascinating point of where we're at with language and digital language.
It's absurdist, it's Dadaist, it doesn't necessarily mean anything. And I'm just fascinated by this phenomenon, and there's something about nonsense or confusion or hard-to-pin-downness that I think emotionally resonates with 2024. And on that, my word of the year as a sentiment, having, as a sentiment and emotion, having talked about all these different things, I chose an observational word, and that's "whiplash."
So on the one hand, we have women influencers: Charlie XCX, Jools Lebron, Simone Biles, putting forth trends around "brat," "demure," "manifest," "romantasy," perhaps even "lore." On the other hand, we have young men in their own world, and they have popularized terms that we haven't discussed as much, like "rawdogging," "mogging," or "looksmaxxing."
MIGNON: What is "mogging"?
JOHN: "Mogging" is a slang word for being more attractive than somebody else, and "looksmaxxing" is a trend of … it refers to efforts to become more attractive, especially taking a lot of extreme efforts. Some of these are used a little bit ironically and jokingly. I was talking about "skibidi" and nonsense language, with internet slang trends, sometimes it's hard to pin down how serious the words are. "Looksmaxxing" also involved this thing called mewing where people were holding their tongue in a certain way to improve their jawline. And it became a classroom prank. So you've got women influencers, you've got young men doing their thing.
You got the Olympics in the summer, and then you have elections going on. You've got the swirl of world events. You've got backlash to AI. You've got retreat from AI. And it just felt pretty viscerally that "whiplash" to me describes this vortical complexity and tension that summarizes 2024. "Skibidi" on the one hand, "whiplash" on the other.
MIGNON: Those both make sense to me. Yeah. And then I wanted to end on a note of looking forward and positivity. I thought that we should come up with aspirational words for 2025. What word are we going to focus on all year to make '25 a better year? And actually, I just said it for me, my word is going to be "focus."
So in 2025, I'm going to try to focus on the things that matter. That's my word that I'll put on a Post-It on my computer for 2025. How about you?
JOHN: It sounds like you're concocting your word New Year's resolution already. My word for 2025 is "wonder." I want to wonder more at nature, at culture. I want to wonder more at words because I feel when you stop to wonder or feel awe, you're a bit more present. And you're immersed in just the absurd beauty of this existence.
And it all begins with wonder under the night stars as it were, or it deep into the pages of a dictionary going how wonderful it is that a word like that exists.Â
MIGNON: Sounds like a good way to live. John Kelly, thank you so much for being here. Your blog is mashedradish.com. Why is it mashed radish?
JOHN: It’s mashed radish because I thought it was a clever way to refer to what etymology is. So etymology, the study of word origins, tries to break down words, mash them into their roots, and the Latin word for "root," its etymology is "radix," R-A-D-I-X, and "radix" is the source of our word "radish." So that is how I came up with an etymology project name and blog that is typically confused for a whole bunch of cooking sites.
And I will say, as part of my research for coming up with that name many years ago, I did cook and mash some radish, and they're pretty good.
MIGNON: Huh. Interesting. That's a fabulous backstory, I had no idea. And you are also MashedRadish on Bluesky, so people can find you there as well.
JOHN: That's correct. Thank you so much. Just search "mashedradish," and you'll find me there because nobody else wanted to take that handle.
MIGNON: That's great. Thank you so much for being here. If you're a Grammarpaloozian, stick around, look in your feed because we're going to have a bonus conversation about words of the year from outside the U.S. that are just fascinating, and John may have some book recommendations for us too. JOHN: Absolutely. Thank you.
Mignon: That’s all. Thanks for listening.