Are you a parasocial? Well, that is the word of the year, according to the Cambridge dictionary, and what does it mean? In a world where AI tools, chatbots and faraway celebrities (think Swifties and the BTS ARMY) appear to form better connections with us than the family member, friend or colleague right next to you, you could stake claim to being a parasocial.
What’s in a word? A good deal. Words can convey feelings, ideas, intent and all shades of thought under the human sun. And when a word rises above the rest to capture the mood of a time period, the zeitgeist of the age, it gets on the podium of ‘Word of the year’
Yes, we are nearing the end of another tumultuous year, and the dictionary folks do not intend to disappoint us this time around, too. Dictionary.com was first off the mark, coming out with its ‘word of the year’ in October itself; maybe they had had enough of 2025 already!, and guess what it was? 67. Yep, that’s a number and that is what the good folks at California’s Dictionary.com adjudged as ‘word of the year’. What exactly is it? Well, a big social media flavour amidst the youth and not particularly meaning anything, no surprise, it’s meant to be so, sort of an inside joke.
It’s no surprise that social media trends have dominated ‘word of the year’ selections in recent years, considering how so much of our lives are now intertwined with cyberspace – cyber itself was the word of the year for the American Dialect Society back in 1994—they were the first to launch ‘word of the year’ in English way back in the early nineties. Some recent examples range from hashtag and bingewatching to hallucinate, referring to AI hallucination and brain rot, as symbolic as it gets, which was Oxford dictionary’s word of the year.
Oxford itself is expected to be out with its ‘word of the year’ in the next fortnight, and that will be keenly awaited, especially since its selections have resonated with the year in myriad ways. It was also the first to go for a non-word as its ‘word of the year’, when it selected the ‘tears of joy’ emoji as its ‘word’ of the year back in 2015.
Very apparently, times are dark, and getting darker; for a quick scroll through the words of the year by the various leading exponents reveal that increasingly, the words selected tend to display negative emotions or thoughts. Joining terms like ‘permacrisis’, ‘gaslighting’ and ‘toxic’ over the past decade, last year’s selections particularly took the cake, words that are depressing as much as they are telling about the times we live in -- polarising by Merriam-Webster, enshittification by Mcquarie Dictionary and of course, brain rot by Oxford.
Going by what’s happening around us, it is pretty unlikely that the rest of this year’s selections are likely to be chirpy or optimistic. And let us close by one Indian word which captured the imagination of the dictionary editors across the world back in 2020 – when, due to the pandemic and lockdowns, Oxford dictionary did not select a specific word, but amongst the list of terms it highlighted was an ‘Indian word of the year’. Guess what it was? Atmanirbharta.
