{"id":40706,"date":"2025-12-13T11:12:27","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T11:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/2025s-words-of-the-year-say-a-lot-about-a-generation-fed-up-with-an-internet-they-cant-quit\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T11:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T11:12:27","slug":"2025s-words-of-the-year-say-a-lot-about-a-generation-fed-up-with-an-internet-they-cant-quit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/2025s-words-of-the-year-say-a-lot-about-a-generation-fed-up-with-an-internet-they-cant-quit\/","title":{"rendered":"2025&#8217;s words of the year say a lot about a generation fed up with an internet they can&#8217;t quit"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/693b30cb04eda4732f2d651f?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Young businesswoman designer feeling exhausted while working on desktop computer in the office.\"\/><figcaption>2025&#039;s words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture.<\/p>\n<p>Pekic\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>2025&#039;s words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture.<\/li>\n<li>Platforms have chosen terms like &quot;fatigue,&quot; &quot;AI slop,&quot; and &quot;rage bait.&quot;<\/li>\n<li>For the first time, Dictionary.com chose a word that is also a number as its Word of the Year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Everyone is over 2025.<\/p>\n<p>Various platforms and dictionaries released their word of the year in December, and the choices widely reflect a sense of inescapable uncertainty, exhaustion, and skepticism of the tech world.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;There&#039;s no denying that 2025 has been a year defined by questions around who we truly are,&quot; said Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, &quot;both online and offline.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>From early-career job seekers stuck in unemployment, to social media content that never seems to advance the conversation, and workers struggling to keep up with AI, here is a list of words that dictionaries and culture-watchers say encapsulate the zeitgeist of 2025.<\/p>\n<h2>Glassdoor: &#039;Fatigue&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>Workers are tired, according to job search platform Glassdoor.<\/p>\n<p>The site that allows workers to post reviews of companies they have worked for or interviewed with coined &quot;fatigue&quot; as its word of the year, after the term saw a 41% spike in mentions across the platform in 2025.<\/p>\n<p>Glassdoor cited how job seekers are growing increasingly frustrated with endless applications that go nowhere, and how emotionally exhausted workers are with the rapid rise of AI.<\/p>\n<p>When Glassdoor asked professionals if they felt like the news cycle was draining their energy at work, 78% said yes. On top of that, job seekers are becoming increasingly frustrated as more &quot;job huggers&quot; hold onto their positions in a low-hire, low-fire job market.<\/p>\n<p>In an ironic admonition, Glassdoor wrote, &quot;Yes, things could be better, but they could also be much worse.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Collins Dictionary: &#039;Vibe coding&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>&quot;Vibe coding,&quot; a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher, refers to the use of natural language prompts to instruct AI to write computer code instead of writing it from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>Collins said that its word of the year and its contenders mark a &quot;further shift towards a tech-dominated world.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>According to OpenAI&#039;s annual enterprise report, code-related queries increased 36% for workers whose primary job is not engineering. Companies like Anthropic also said that its in-house AI, Claude, is now writing 90% of code for its teams.<\/p>\n<h2>Oxford Dictionary: &#039;Rage bait&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>If you ever feel so angry over online content that you feel compelled to repost it and give the comment section a piece of your mindyou may have encountered the Oxford Dictionary&#039;s word of the year: &quot;rage bait.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Oxford defined the word as &quot;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.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>According to Oxford&#039;s data, the use of &quot;rage bait&quot; has tripled in 2025 compared to the year before, hinting at &quot;a deeper shift in how we talk about attention \u2014 both how it is given and how it is sought after.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Cambridge Dictionary: &#039;Parasocial&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>Many people seem unable to quit social media. And that could be largely due to &quot;parasocial&quot; relationships, which Cambridge Dictionary coined as word of the year.<\/p>\n<p>The term refers to one-sided &quot;relationships that people form with celebrities, influencers, and AI chatbots,&quot; Cambridge Dictionary wrote.<\/p>\n<p>For example, how fans often feel a deep connection to Taylor Swift&#039;s lyrics about heartbreak, to the spontaneity of podcast hosts, and the &quot;emotionally meaningful&quot; and &quot;in some cases troubling&quot; connection between users and AI chatbots.<\/p>\n<p>Business Insider has documented various instances where people become emotionally dependent on an AI model or form long-term relationships with AI girlfriends. The release of AI companions by platforms like Grock, including a flirtatious anime girl, can increase the likelihood of such parasocial relationships.<\/p>\n<h2>Macquarie Dictionary: &#039;AI slop&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>The Australian English dictionary chose &quot;AI slop&quot; as its top word of the year, highlighting concern over &quot;low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The rise of AI-generated content has contributed to longer and more annoying memos at work that don&#039;t actually push productivity forward, as well as tricked some news platforms into publishing inaccurate information, such as when the Chicago Sun-Times published an AI-generated summer reading list that matched real authors with books they never wrote.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;While in recent years we&#039;ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop,&quot; said the Macquarie Dictionary Committee.<\/p>\n<h2>Dictionary.com: &#039;67&#039;<\/h2>\n<p>Dictionary.com chose a numeral \u2014 the number 67 \u2014 as its word of the year, for the first time since the site started naming word of the year in 2010.<\/p>\n<p>The word, pronounced &quot;six seven&quot; instead of &quot;sixty-seven,&quot; experienced a dramatic rise in search volume since the summer of 2025 and increased more than sixfold since June, said Dictionary.com.<\/p>\n<p>Described as &quot;meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical,&quot; Dictionary.com said it thinks this word means &quot;so-so&quot; or &quot;maybe this, maybe that,&quot; which makes some sense if you&#039;re rating something a six or seven out of 10.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you&#039;re a member of Gen Alpha,&quot; Dictionary.com added, &quot;maybe you&#039;re smirking at the thought of adults once again struggling to make sense of your notoriously slippery slang.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2025&#039;s words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture. Pekic\/Getty Images 2025&#039;s words of the year reflect a generation frustrated with job prospects, AI, and online culture. Platforms have chosen terms like &quot;fatigue,&quot; &quot;AI slop,&quot; and &quot;rage bait.&quot; For the first time, Dictionary.com chose a word that is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}