This year’s Word of the Year selection from Collins Dictionary perfectly captures the public’s deep-seated conflict over artificial intelligence. The 2025 list is defined by two opposing AI terms: “vibe coding,” the optimistic winner, and “clanker,” the derogatory runner-up, illustrating a society both thrilled by and terrified of its own creations.
“Vibe coding,” which was crowned Word of the Year, represents the utopian promise of AI. Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, it describes the process of using natural language to generate code, effectively democratizing software development. Collins’ managing director, Alex Beecroft, called it a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence.”
On the other side of the coin is “clanker.” This Star Wars-derived insult for robots and AI went viral on social media, becoming the go-to term for expressing frustration with automated systems. Its popularity, which made it a top contender for the year’s top word, reveals a deep-seated distrust and fear of AI’s encroachment on human life.
This technological tension was the defining theme of the 2025 list. The term “broligarchy” was also included, serving as a critical label for the tech executives responsible for this AI boom. Even “biohacking,” the quest for human optimization, speaks to a desire to use technology to transcend natural limitations.
The rest of the list provided a snapshot of the world these technologies are shaping. It included “Henry” (high earner, not rich yet), reflecting economic pressures, and “taskmasking” (faking productivity), a symptom of the modern digital workplace. “Aura farming” (looking cool online) and “glaze” (excessive flattery) rounded out the picture of our tech-mediated social lives.
