Collins 2025 List: Social Media “Glaze” and AI “Vibe Coding” Define the Year

Collins Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year list is a study in contrasts, drawing from the worlds of high-tech AI development and ephemeral social media trends. The winner, “vibe coding,” represents a new frontier of human-machine collaboration, while the inclusion of “glaze” highlights our skepticism of online social dynamics.
“Glaze,” a new term of disapproval, has gained traction this year for meaning “to praise or flatter someone excessively or undeservedly.” Its popularity reflects a growing cynicism towards the performative adulation common in influencer culture and online fan communities.
This social trend was juxtaposed against the year’s winner, “vibe coding.” This term describes the use of natural language and AI to generate computer code, a practice that lowers the barrier to software development. Coined by OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, it represents an optimistic future for technology.
Lexicographers at Collins, who monitor a 24-billion-word corpus, selected “vibe coding” for its “huge increase in usage” since February. Alex Beecroft of Collins praised it as a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence.”
The list also featured “aura farming,” another social media term for curating a cool persona. These were joined by “clanker” (an AI insult), “broligarchy” (the tech elite), “Henry” (high earner, not rich yet), and “biohacking,” painting a picture of a society obsessed with technology and social status.